“Immigrants in Swedish media” : A qualitative text analysis of the media's construction o immigrants in Swedish morning- and evening newspapers during the period 2016–2021

The media plays a major role in today's society. What we do not experience ourselves, we can be told through the media. Seen from this, the purpose of this study is to investigate how immigrants are described in news articles in Swedish morning and evening newspapers during the period 2016-2021, with focus on the negative aspects. We will focus on answering which specific characteristics the term immigrant is associated with and in which perspectives it is written about immigrants. The study is based on a qualitative text analysis and the empirical material we have collected thus consists of 24 news articles.The articles were analyzed using post colonial theory, the dichotomy We and the Others and stereotypes.The results show that Swedish morning and evening newspapers describe immigrants in more negative than positive terms. There is also a continuous description of characteristics in the form of stereotypes. Newspapers portray, so to speak, an image of immigrants as different, deviant and foreign. At the same time, the results show that there is a marked difference between immigrants and Swedes as immigrants stand in sharp contrast to the so-called "Swedishness". The conclusions we can draw from the results is that the media differentiate between immigrants and ethnic Swedes with the help of different characteristics and perspectives to describe immigrants