The Milk War : A discourse analysis of the conflict between Oatly and the dairy industry in news media 2014-2019

The purpose of this thesis is to study what the media reporting on the conflict between Oatly and the milk industry is about, in what ways the climate issue is being discussed and what meanings different actors of the conflict are being attributed with. Articles from four nationwide newspapers, published between the 25th of September and the 4th of December 2019, served as material. To concretize the aim of my study, three questions were formulated: what discourses appear in the articles, what subject positions are attributed to the actors in the material and what central concepts and arguments are used and what meanings are attributed to them. The used method for this study was a discourse analysis influenced mainly by Laclau & Mouffes discourse theory. The theories to support this method were the discourse theory, Saussures linguistic theory and Halls approach to representation. The results of the analysis points to that there are three different discourses amongst the media reporting: the Inconsistency discourse, the Conversion discourse and the Competition discourse. Four different subject positions from which discourses interpellated subjects into: Animalierna, Vegetabilierna, Farmers and Consumers. The most central concepts that was being used and attributed with different meanings were milk, oat milk and climate. The main conclusion that could be drawn from these results was that there are three different ways in which the language organizes our understanding of this conflict. Even though the climate change in relation to consumption is at the epicentre of the arguments being brought up, no pronounced possibility of a society without any form of milk was being discussed. The message that is perceived through news media is that we need to choose between one of the two, either milk or oat milk, but we cannot choose to consume neither