The EU in Swedish News: Assessment of SVT’s Broadcasted EU News Coverage

Abstract: This research has analyzed SVT’s broadcasted EU news coverage in 2012. SVT is Sweden’s main public service media outlet, and the point of the research was to understand how EU news has been covered by this media outlet. The reasons for why this is important is because the media plays a vital role in democracies for a number of reasons looked upon in this research, one of them being that the media acts as the watchdogs of democracy, particularly the public service ones. The theoretical aspect is based upon Foucault’s power relations in discourses, as well as Habermas’ normative values regarding the media. Additionally, a discourse analysis is used to uncover trends in the EU news coverage. The material used has been collected from SVT’s TV-archives, and contains 177 news clips. The analysis was approached in two ways. The first one, macro-analysis, looked at general trends in frequency, topics, reasons, and agents; the second one, micro-analysis, looked at lingual examples of the coverage. There are four conclusions. Firstly, there is a low frequency of EU coverage. Secondly, the EP is almost neglected in the coverage. Thirdly, there is a biased EU coverage. And lastly, the EU is presented unrepresentatively.