Journalism and Royalty: Historicizing the Myth of the Mediated Centre

Provided that there is a dominant centre of power in society, the media have always regarded it their responsibility to cover that centre. For symbolic reasons at least, the head of state personifies the national power centre, whereas the citizens inhabit the periphery and are supposedly dependent on the media to get information from the social centre. Today, national centres of power tend to be represented as synonymous with the actual buildings that symbolise the concentrated leadership of politics – the White House in the US, 10 Downing Street in the UK, the Kremlin in Russia. The Swedish equivalent of this is Rosenbad, the Government’s Office. Historically, however, the national ‘centre ’ of Sweden has been the Royal Castle. In spite of Swedish monarchy being de-politicized in 1974, king Carl XVI Gustaf and the royal family are still represented as if they were part of our national centre, and royal family occasions continue to take on their traditional character of media events. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct and reconstruct the myth of the mediated centre as a historical product, and to explore the state of this myth at different stages in time. I will do this through an examination of visual and verbal press material from three Swedish royal weddings – in 1888, 1932 and 1976, respectively