The tsunami disaster – a Swedish calamity? : A qualitative text analysis of the Swedish media’s portrayal of the victims of the tsunami disaster.

The purpose of this study was to examine how Swedish media portrayed victims of the tsunami disaster and the tropes and themes that was presented in interviews with victims. Two major Swedish newspapers were used in the study. The newspapers in question were Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet and their digital archive has been investigated to achieve this purpose. To achieve results, a qualitative text analysis was used to read through the papers in search for interviews that would help achieve the studies purpose. The results were analysed with the help of earlier studies done on surrounding subjects as well as a postcolonial theory to establish if there were any postcolonial tendencies in Swedish medias portrayal of the victims. The articles used in this paper were divided into three time periods, December 2004, January 2005 and 1, 5 and 10 years after the calamity to see if the victim narrative changed over the course of time. Different time periods were used to get a broader perspective of the victim narrative, however one result stood out and that was a theme regarding the usage of children to depict loss and suffering.