The Pressure on the Press : A Qualitative and Comparative Study of two Swedish Newspapers and their Coverage of the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact and the start of World War 2

The purpose of this essay is to examine how and what two Swedish newspapers wrote about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the initial invasion of Poland during the Second World War. Additionally this works also seeks to find any major differences between the two newspaper coverage of the events studied. To achieve this goal a qualitative and comparative method was applied to the source material, which consist of the newspapers Nya WermlandsTidningen (NWT) and Dagens Nyheter (DN) during the period from August 23 to the eight of September. The theory which was applied is a variant of critical discourse analysis. The results of the essay can be summarized as follows: Both NWT and DN provided and adequate coverage of the events, although they often reported on the same events and with the same sources they used different headlines and sometimes reached different conclusions. In regards to the comparative study this reveals that largely they reported on minor differences and that most of the major stories are similar