Victim of the bullets of the law

The purpose of this study is to examine the media coverage of a police shooting in Bagarmossen, Stockholm. According to the news the police claimed it was an act of self-defense as a man fired a gun at them which is why the man was shot to death, but a month later stated that the man had not even been armed. The following study seeks to analyze the differences and similarities between articles published before and after the modified information. It also examines social actors present and how the media portrays them. We applied discourse analysis on sixteen news articles to answer our research questions. The prominent differences we found were in the portrayals of the incident and the most protrusive social actors in­volved. Before the police changed their state­ment, the man shot dead was portrayed as a criminal with deviant behavior. After the changed statement, the media portrayed him as a family man with strong ties to his hometown. The police were another social actor in our study, portrayed before the changed statements as efficient with a strong work ethic. After, the police were por­trayed as dishonest and lacking severely in their communica­tion as a legitimate authori­ty. One of the similarities found before and after the changed statement was the pres­ence of the local community as a social actor and its significance for the news media's portrayal of the incident.