Producing an internal other : Presentations of the Swedish north in Swedish national press

For years the northern parts of Sweden, Norrland (translated: North land) has been considered mystified and exotified by the southern, more urban parts of the country. The rural Norrland – though 60 percent of Sweden – is seldom a part of the common conversation, meaning that most of the people living in the southern parts simply have no idea what is happening in the north. The one million people living in Norrland, on the other hand, every day gets to know what happens in the south on the evening news. The question about this possible structural relation between the urban and the rural became a large matter of cultural debate in the spring of 2015, If this thesis is true, we have a problem on our hands; can the national news be considered national if half the country is misrepresented? That question is what this essay is trying to find out by analyzing two of Swedens largest national newspapers. This essay has, with critical discourse analyzis as method, read articles from the largest daily newspaper in Sweden, Dagens Nyheter, and the largest tabloid in Sweden, Aftonbladet. The articles all refer to the county of Jämtland – one of the counties in Norrland – in some way. The conclusions are grounded in medial theories such as the agenda setting-theory, theorys of priming and framing and new values. Recent research regarding areas in medial periphery and the social construction of Norrland also supports the final conclusions. In reading the articles found from 1994, 2004 and 2014 it has come clear that the language being used by the press can be considered producing and reproducing hierarchies between the north and the south. For instance, the three by this essay presented discourse themes – “the village”, “the nature” and “the people” – can be interpreted as three existing, and co-existing, discourse themes producing and reproducing an image of Norrland as inferior to the rest of the country. In conclusion, this essay states that the press examined actually takes part in constructing a structural relation between the urban and the rural areas of Sweden and that the county of Jämtland is being presented as a distant ”internal other” in comparison with the normal cities in the south of Sweden.