Material—why mainstream press?

The material of the study will be presented further here. The empirical core of this dissertation is comprised of the total coverage, the 51 news articles that were published, in Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter during the two months before and one month after the closure of Saab Automobiles factory in 2011² in order to glimpse the prelude, the actual closing of the factory, and a part of the aftermath. The choice to focus on these months springs from the idea that a bankruptcy and closure of a factory can be regarded as a critical moment/case (Danermark, et al., 2002) when the discourses and the positions taken can provide insights about the ideas, understandings and aims of different actors. It represents a moment when

2The first study also comprises television material from both the national and local news, 20 news pieces from Rapport and Västnytt.

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everything is brought to a head and is therefore a case when the importance of the politics of ideas and how this is communicated increases (Blyth, 2001). The comparative ambition brought the decision to analyze also 40 articles from the same newspapers published during the same three months, before and after the bankruptcy, covering the crisis in the textile industry in 1977 (substudy 1 and 3), as well as 49 articles from 2008 when the crisis in the car industry first became visible (substudy 2). The choice to include data from 2008 was made given the fact that this was the time when GM announced it wanted to sell and offered the Swedish government the opportunity to buy the company, which implies the question of political responsibility for the industry is a valid topic in the news. The comparison with this critical moment and the moment of the actual closing of the factory is made to understand what happened to the question of political responsibility, in what way it was emphasized and negotiated in 2008 and how it was covered in 2011. In total 140 news articles from two Swedish newspapers, Aftonbladet, which has the largest circulation of the evening papers, and Dagens Nyheter, with the largest circulation of the morning papers, have been analyzed. I wish to stress once again that the comparison is not between the newspapers but between the different time periods.

The choice of newspapers was made due to the fact that these two national newspapers are the largest ones in Sweden today, where one is a morning paper considered more high brow than the other, which is an evening tabloid. These differences imply that a somewhat different logic could exist for the journalists in terms of what events to cover as well as how, which in that case provides this study with material representing a broader range of journalistic logic. The stated position of the editorial page of Dagens Nyheter is “independently liberal” and Aftonbladet is “social democratic”, and this fact, that they represent different political viewpoints, also influenced the choice to include them in this study. In other words, it is not the narrow niche press that is examined in this study but the largest morning and evening newspapers, presumably governed by slightly different logics and with editorial pages expressing different political positions which taken

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together give the material some width despite the fact that only two newspapers have been examined.

In this age and time the question will inevitably pop up: why look at newspapers? It is easy to get the impression that “old media” has played its part and nowadays the news agenda is set by anyone with an internet connection and a decent amount of persistence and “followers”. Social media and blogs, that is where the action is, right? There is however research pointing to traditional news media remaining as important to society today as ever before. The blogosphere absorbs some of the traditional media’s audience share but large established organizations still distribute more original news to a larger audience than any other news provider model (McChesney and Nichols, 2010; Kamiya, 2009; Schechter, 2005). Society’s need for traditional news media as being most prominent during times of crisis has been stressed and attention paid to how the public then turns to established media, more than to any other source in search of trustworthy information and context in a crisis (Rosenstiel, 2008).

It has been suggested that the alarms about the imminent breakdown of

“traditional” media are exaggerated as newspapers still play a central role in the provision of news, contributing to the gathering and distribution of local, regional or international news. Ahlers and Hessen claim newspapers still have an unchallenged track record when it comes to covering public affairs and they predict newspapers will keep on setting the news agenda (Ahlers and Hessen, 2005, p.65) Despite the fact that a decade has passed since that prediction it is perhaps wise not to dismiss completely newspapers’ ability to set the agenda and frame an issue or to rule out their news material as irrelevant to examine. At the time of the crisis in the car industry, the printed press was still the main employer of journalists in most OECD countries (Oh, 2010) and far from a whisper in the margin. The choice to analyze newspapers derives from a notion that the way events and actors are represented in the mainstream press matters for public discourses about rights and responsibilities in times of crisis.

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In conclusion, the above chapter has presented the method of the study and explained the choice to make a comparison between crisis news discourses from similar crises situated in different contexts. The two cases of crisis have been further introduced and the choice of the two newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet, has been discussed.

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