Ditt vittnesmål i mordrättegången – finns där poddar finns. En kritisk diskursanalys av tre svenska kommersiella true crime-podcasts etiska förhållningssätt till brottsoffer

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine how victims are portrayed in three swedish commercial true crime podcasts. Journalistic ethics in relation to how the victim and the perpetrator was portrayed in the podcasts was of big importance when conducting the study. Since there are few regulations in Swedish law concerning podcasts as media platform, we wanted to look further into this. Based on this we constructed three questions of issue that we seek to answer: How are victims portrayed in three swedish commercial true crime podcasts? How is the “the publics right to know” imprinted on the content in three swedish commercial true crime podcasts? How do the podcasts that are analyzed relate to journalistic ethics? For the first question of issue we applied Nils Christies theories criterias of ‘ideal victims”. The second question of issue was analyzed through Cameron-Dows concept of “the publics right to know” in crime reports, supported by studies made by Jesper Strömbäck about what journalists consider to be newsworthy. On the third question of issue we applied Wigorts Yngvessons ways of explaining the western worlds views on journalism based on two ethical views: consquential neutrality and social responsibility theory. The method in use is a Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and we’re analyzing a total of five podcast episodes from three different podcasts. The results showed that there are, of varied degree, occurences of ideal victims in the analyzed true-crime podcasts. The podcastmakers are relatively good at dealing with journalistic ethics, even though some are more prone to breach the personal sphere and share sensitive information than others.