The joke is on you. En kvantitativ innehållsanalys av partiskheten i den svenska dagspressen 1952-1992

Abstract

Satire plays an essential role in propaganda and is used to criticize power by ridicule and folly. Today, we rarely see political cartoons in the Swedish daily press, but it hasn’t always been that way. Research has shown that political cartoons have been an integrated part of newspapers during the 20th century, reaching its peak 1970-1990 and then slowly decreasing in frequency. Yet to be studied is the political bias in Swedish daily newspapers, which will be implemented through a quantitative content analysis of various Swedish newspapers 1952-1992. This study is built upon a previous study which deals with the main aspects of political and editorial cartoons in several Swedish printed newspapers during the years 1890-2017. A theory of political bias will be implemented as well. My hypotheses were 1) The newspaper directs satire at the paper’s political opponents and 2) Newspapers publish satire directed at the government regardless of its political color. The purpose of this study is to identify political bias in political cartoons in the Swedish daily press 1952-1992. By asking the questions ‘’To what extent is satire directed at the newspaper’s political opponents?’’ and ‘’To what extent is satire directed at the government parties?’’, I'm hoping to gain new knowledge about political bias in the Swedish daily press. This study includes the newspapers Aftonbladet, Arbetet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Göteborgs-Posten, Svenska Dagbladet and Sydsvenska Dagbladet. By looking at 394 political cartoons from various Swedish printed newspapers I’ve been able to get a deeper understanding of the partial press. The variables examined were the political color of each newspaper, which party was subject to criticism and whether the criticized party was part of the government or not. The variable party subject to criticism were categorized into six parts: The Conservatives, The social democrats, The Liberals, general politics, multiple and opposition. The results reveal that five out of seven newspapers were politically biased to their own party, except the newspapers Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter. In addition, there’s a clear pattern in the targeted satire of the government parties, whereas despite the government (political ideology), newspapers always seem to target the current government parties. A common theme in satire was to criticize politics and politicans in general, in some cases reaching up to 25 percent of a paper’s total satire. This concludes that the printed press values journalistic values more than their political identification, at least regarding the targeted satire against the government parties. There seems to be a stronger correlation between the newspapers and the governmental targeted satire, than the correlation between the newspapers and the directed satire against the paper’s political opponents. But overall, both hypotheses were correct and can be applied to the years before and after the period examined 1952-1992.