"Börja packa Chávez!"- En kritisk diskursanalys över tre svenska morgontidningars rapportering kring Venezuelas folkomröstning om Hugo Chávez'presidentskap 2004

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, is described in Swedish mass media. The research question of the paper is "How was president Hugo Chávez portrayed in Swedish newspapers in the 2004 Venezuelan referendum?". The answer of this question provides information about how the mass media form the image of current political events which is an important aspect of power. The applied method and theory in the study is the critical discourse analysis. The material consists of texts published in the Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter, Göteborgs-Posten and Sydsvenska Dagbladet as well as several books and articles about the political situation in Venezuela after the victory of Chávez in 1998 in order to relate the Swedish "Chávez-discourse" to the social and political context of Venezuela. The thesis' most important finding is that Hugo Chávez is being portrayed as a classical Latin American dictator in the swedish mass media