Hörs du så finns du : En studie av mångfalden i Sveriges Radio P4

The purpose of this paper is to study the diversity in Swedish Public Service Radio channel P4. We study the diversity both among the editorial news staff and in the news-broadcasts. We also study the opinions of two news directors of the Swedish Public Service Radio channel P4. The organisation has a national diversity policy that they should follow. We investigate if it is really followed or if it is just a document. We use Social Responsibility Theory to explain why media images should represent the actual society and Media Logic to explain the result of our study. We think it is important that media represent the same population as the region which it covers. We used a quantitative method to explore the diversity in the news-broadcasts for two weeks (288 broadcasts) listening for people with a foreign background and qualitative interviews to find the opinions of the news directors in Kalmar and Malmö. To study the diversity in the editorial staff we used e-mail and telephone contact with the management on each of the 25 stations nationwide. We define foreign background as someone who the audience might assume as coming from a different country based on accent, pronunciation or name. Our results show that nine percent of the editorial news staff on Swedish Public Service Channel P4 has a foreign background by our definition. 53 percent of them are women and 47 percent are men. 60 percent of these journalists are between 26 and 45 years of age. In Kalmar, 8,4 percent of the people who were heard in the news had a foreign background. This is a little higher than the percentage of the population who was born in another country in the region that these news are supposed to cover. In Malmö, 11,1 percent of the people who were heard in the news had a foreign background. This is lower than the percentage in this station’s region. Both news directors agree that the representation of people with foreign background could be better in their news. Our conclusions are that the percentage of people with foreign background in the local area that the news is supposed to cover seems to matter very little when it comes to their representation in the news-broadcasts. We discuss different possible reasons for this in the paper