“They have been shooting in 180 degrees and all about after getaway cars" : a quantitative study of the reporting in Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet about gang criminality between 2010-2021

This thesis aimed to find out how gang violence had been reported in the Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet between 2010-2021 and if there had been any changes during the selected time period. The articles for the thesis were chosen through a probability sample technique called systematic sample. There were around 8000 articles in total that were found while using our searchterms. Then every tenth article was chosen for coding from each year. A total number of 811 articles were collected, 466 from Dagens Nyheter and 345 from Aftonbladet. The thesis found that there was no significant difference between the newspapers in the way of reporting about gang violence during the time period. Both Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet reported a lot about the criminal actions that the gangs had committed and the newspapers had a tendency to report the crimes that were of a violent nature. The reporting of the gang members showed that they often did not mention their age, gender or ethnicity. Both newspapers also used different words in their reporting, both for gang violence and the gang members, which could make it hard to know the difference between acts done by gangs and by other criminals