The distorted immigrant : A qualitative study about how the media audience interprets and sees through the representations of immigrants in Swedish media

The aim of this study was to seek knowledge about how the media audience interprets media representations of immigrants as well as the construction of ”us” and ”them” that is created from the media report. We implemented two focus group interviews, one containing only ethnical Swedes and one holding a variety of people with different ethnical backgrounds. The focus groups got to read nine news articles from different Swedish news papers selected by us, based upon previous research. These articles got to serve as the basis of the discussion.To supplement the focus groups, which got to represent the media audience, we also interviewed two different persons we choose to call informants, whom are both immigrants and are or have been politically active and often appear in local media.The interviews were our empirical material which was used for analysis. The method we used was qualitative analysis of meaning and was based upon a hermeneutic starting point, meaning that all humans are interpreting beings. As a theoretical base we used a social constructivistic perspective, with central theories such as stereotyping and representations. The result showed that the media audience sees through the distorted media representations of immigrants. There was an obvious awareness among the participants but at the same time they admitted being affected by the stereotypes and incorrect representations of immigrants. Reluctant racial prejudice could be discerned in the shape of implicit racism in spite of the awareness that was proved. All the participants agreed on the fact that Muslims are the people who are seen as collective representatives of all immigrants. The reason for this bias they all thought originated from the extreme representation of Muslims in the media, that is, there are more often fundamentalists who are allowed to be seen and to make statements in the media than ordinary people. There were also dissimilarities in the interpretation of the media representations between the Swedish group and the group from mixed ethnic backgrounds