The Visual Embodiment of Gender and Ethnicity In Public Service News : A Study of SVT Nyheter’s online news

The representation of gender and ethnicity in the media has been widely acknowledged by scholars. Numerous studies have highlighted the underrepresentation of women and people of different ethnicities in news media, addressing not only the small number of their presence, but the way they are generalized and stereotyped through certain characteristics. Despite decades of scholarship, the results remain the same depicting men in positions of power and authority and women as subordinate to most men, often depicted as representatives in different contexts and rather as private persons within the private sphere. As the media influences people’s behaviour and attitudes through constant repetition of certain images, the power of pictures and the visual culture of news need to be addressed. In regard to previous research, the purpose of the given thesis is to examine the visual representation of women, men and people of different ethnicities in the online news of SVT Nyheter. Particularly by examining in what contexts and how, gender and ethnicity is visually embodied in the content of SVT Nyheter. The study is significant as SVT has a certain responsibility in showing a broad spectrum of representation from a gender and diversity perspective. Furthermore, there is a research gap to fill when it comes to studies of public service and the visual representation of news. However, by combining the meaning of visual and written text, the empirical part of this study is conducted through a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative content analysis with a multimodal visual analysis. The results reveal that men are most often embodied in the news articles of SVT Nyheter, both in stories of women/womanhood or men/manhood. Moreover, men are more likely to be portrayed as persons in positions of power and authority. The only two news topics in which women are overrepresented are gender issues and diversity issues. These categories raise questions of female subordination and resistance, often embodied through the smiling gaze. Hence, women’s experiences are reduced by their visual embodiment. Persons defined as “weaker”, such as people of different ethnicities, are more likely to directly face the camera, especially smiling when the topic connotes other feelings. The non-represented are people of different ethnicities or marginalised groups, often addressed but not given a voice. On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that media raises power relations, illustrating that ”the human body”, is most often the male body.