Skandalen blir bättre när tv-mysgubbar dras fram på allmänhetens giljotin : En kvalitativ innehållsanalys av Expressens gestaltning av misstänkta gärningsmän vid nyhetsrapporteringen i kölvattnet av #metoo

In October 2017, the actor Alyssa Milano announced a wish that all women who, in some way, have been sexually abused would answer their tweets with the words "me too". Almost a day later, #metoo breaks into Swedish social media. There are testimonies of countless of sexual harassments and abuse both from known, unknown and anonymous women who testify to the breadth of the major problem that came to be resembled as a revolution within the next few days. During the news reporting in connection with the campaign we discovered how the Swedish media generally showed differences in how suspected offenders were portrayed in the media. Using formulated analysis tools dramaturgical narrative techniques and criteria for newsworthiness from theories of media logic and theories of news value, we aim to investigate how one of the largest newspapers in Sweden, Expressen, choose to figure suspected perpetrators into sexual offenses in the context of the #metoo campaign. Our main research question is; “How do suspected offenders appear in Expressen's reporting of #metoo in relation to certain dramaturgic narrative techniques?” and “How are some suspects perpetrated in Expressen's reporting of #metoo in relation to certain news value criteria?” With a qualitative content analysis we examined a total of 20 articles and identified results that indicate that the suspected perpetrators according to our interpretation are expressed in the Expressens news reporting in such a way that they are to be perceived as guilty to the crime they're accused for. By identifying our chosen news value criteria in the empirical material which our study is based on, our interpretation is that there's a high news value of reporting suspected offenders in context of the #metoo campaign. The result of our study aims at contributing knowledge about how suspicious perpetrators are portrayed in cases of crime in the media. During our literature review, we found that the research previously conducted on media and crime is primarily about how the victim is portrayed in the media. With our study we want to contribute to the knowledge of how suspected perpetrators are portrayed, which can raise the awareness of how the media through different dramatic storytelling techniques and news evaluation criteria can shape news in different ways