Journalistik på olika villkor. En kvalitativ studie om etnicitetens betydelse för journalisters yrkesutövning

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine what experiences can be found regarding the importance of ethnicity in the journalistic professional practices of Swedish journalists with a non-Nordic ethnicity and how that might be expressed. The questions this study aims to answer are: How do Swedish journalists with a non-Nordic ethnicity in Sweden experience that their ethnicity can be of importance for how they are treated at their workplace and how can that be expressed? How do Swedish journalists with a non-Nordic ethnicity in Sweden experience that their ethnicity can be of importance for how they are treated when working in the field and how can that be expressed? How do Swedish journalist with a non-Nordic ethnicity in Sweden experience that their ethnicity can be of importance for their work practice in other ways than described in question 1 and 2? The study is a qualitative interview-study where semi-structured interviews with nine journalists of a non-Nordic ethnicity from newsrooms around Sweden were completed. The journalists answered questions based on themes in an interview guide that were formed with inspiration from earlier studies. The themes are: autonomy, impartiality, information gathering, discriminating comments, recruitment, and advancement. Based on the theory of structural racism and Critical race theory, as well as earlier studies, the respondents’ answers were analyzed and patterns were identified. We concluded that Swedish journalists with a non-Nordic ethnicity can experience that their ethnicity is of importance in their professional practice. That applies to each theme, where the results show that journalists of non-Nordic ethnicity can experience that their impartiality is questioned. They can also experience difficulties when requesting information from authorities and be exposed to more discriminatory comments than ethnically Nordic colleagues. We found that a perception regarding that the newsrooms do not work hard enough to increase the ethnic diversity can be found among journalists, and in cases where newsrooms do work with diversity it is to create an illusion of inclusivity and diversity, rather than to represent a larger part of the population.