Refugees in Swedish newpapers : A comparative discourse analysis of the portrayals of refugees in Swedish media during the 1990’s and the 2010’s.

The following study is a comparativ discourse analysis of three swedish newspapers, with different political tendencies, depiction of refugees in the 1990’s and the 2010’s. The study is based on the theory of discourse and discourse analysis and the method is an adapted form of Ulf Mörkenstam’s analysis of the description of the samis in swedish law texts. This method is formed from the conclusion that by identifying what the author mediate as a problem, the cause of the problem, and the solution of the problem, you can form an percetion of the subjects discourse. To help create an estimation of the subjects he uses so called chains of analogy, or as the famous discourse theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe calles them, chains of equivalence. In this case the term ”refugee” is connected to other phrases within the same text and together with the context of the problem – cause – solution it forms the discourse. The subject of the discourse is then compared between two different points in times to see if it has been a change within the last 23 years. The study showed that the discourse have indeed changed. While the characters within the discourse have remained the same and the subject is connected to similair problems in 2015, the fact that the newspapers do not write about the resistance against the countrys refugee intake in an atempt to act as an opposition against the xenophobia, as they did in 1992, the result of this study shows that xenophobia has been more accepted in the swedish media during the last decades. This is also shown through the chains of analogy where the phrase ”refuge” is related to words with more negative association in 2015 than in 1992