To Örebro University

This article aims to explore dialogic and solidaritarian modes of communication in relation to democracy that builds on communicational exchange in and with the media, and particularly in relation to online news communication. Departing from the fraud dialogue concept, it defines and exemplifies solidaritarian modes of communication, which are argued to better meet the challenges of democracy and online journalism. This theoretical discussion draws on examples from a debate on the reconstruction of the comments sections in Swedish online newspapers. The debate concerned hate speech, freedom of speech/censorship, anonymity/openness, and moderation/registration policies. I argue that solidaritarian modes of communication include and exceed dialogue through their attitude (discursive mode of address) and practice (discursive or non-discursive mode of action) of reciprocal exchange, empathy, responsibility and restitution. A particular underlining of responsibility as journalistic/editorial/publicist indicates the importance of the communicative setting, online journalism, where ‘journalism’ turns out to be more crucial than ‘online’.

This chapter is about the journalistic genre termed foreign news and examines the development of the genre during a time period that spans from the last years of the Cold War in the 1980s to the years after the new millenium after September 11, 2001. Articles from the Swedish press published in 1987, 1995, and 2002 are analyzed in relation to notions of globalization. I argue that throughout the time period surveyed, which coincides with the period when the concept of globalization entered academic as well as public discussion to become a generic paradigm, foreign news remained largely unaffected by de-nationalizing tendencies and moreover increased its use of exoticizing perspectives. This development in foreign news contradicts theories of globalization that stress de-nationalization and de-exoticization. In fact, in an age of alleged globalization, foreign news is still steered by the “will to nationhood,” and acts as a flagship of the nation.

This article aims to fill the media representation gap in identity politics research by exploring connections to different identity politics models in representations of people in world news and relate them to discourses on humanity and notions of globalization respectively. News picture slideshows from Swedish, UK and US web newspapers are studied with an analytics of mediation approach. Slideshows of May Day are the focus alongside everyday slideshows. Intersections of identity politics models and discourses on humanity/notions of globalization are in the end sketched in a schematic model. The analysis shows that the reifying identity model dominates, and appears as a shortcut to media attention. It also discloses various possibilities of employing universalism and a focus on people’s status. The key role of images in mediated identity politics is highlighted and it is argued that media studies is imperative for identity politics research, and vice versa.

This article examines representations of indigenous peoples in Swedish and Canadian press coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit (COP15). It discusses tensions between the international character of UN summits and the often transnational character of indigenous peoples as well as the issue of climate change. It considers how conceptions of nature, culture and politics intersect in the coverage, and in what roles indigenous peoples appear. Building on theories concerning the representation of indigenous peoples, traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and identity politics, the study combines content and framing analysis with discourse analysis of a small sample of articles about indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples are underrepresented in the coverage. When indigenous voices emerge they appear as victim-heroes and important intermediaries of urgency and spirituality. They also appear as intermediaries of de-nationalization, but they are misframed politically, recognized in terms of their culture rather than represented in terms of their status.

The nation is one of the most resilient concepts in our understanding of the world and its societies. Politics, sports and cultural events, in news as well as in fiction, are largely structured by the national logic. Internationalism – be it in representation, production or consumption – does not challenge the privileged position of the nation. Globalising processes do offer an alternative to the primacy of the nation, but have so far been unable to overcome its dominance. The nation’s resilience is, in part, due to its continuing relevance: ontologically, it offers a sense of territorial stability and security while epistemologically it can supply a sense of familiarity and order in the global landscape. This volume provides cutting edge analysis of old and new architectures of the nation and its mediated presence in everyday life. In an age of alleged globalisation, nations and nation-states have been claimed to be out-dated. However, the proclamation of the end of the nation (-state) has been premature. Eschewing fashionable obituaries for media, geography and the nation, leading media scholars explore the complex ideological and spatial changes in contemporary understandings of the nation. The nation can be seen as a nodal point of media discourse. Hence the power, the politics and the poetics of the nation will be the subject of this book.

This chapter is a study of Swedish media reporting about COP15, the UN climate summit in Copenhagen 2009. It is contained in a book with studies of media reporting on the same issue from 17 other countries around the world. The study comprises both quantitative and qualitative parts, including employment of genres, representations of actors, and employment of news frames. The main frames in the Swedish reporting are the Political Game Frame and the Issue Frame. The Political Game Frame is most salient in the examined elite morning paper, which incidentally had more reporters on location in Copenhagen, whereas the Issue Frame is most salient in the examined tabloid, which had a series of reports focusing on conditions for indigenous peoples, and small nations, in different parts of the world. The latter reports include understandings of climate change as a global phenomenon, and connect the fight against it to the spirituality of nature. Conversely, in the Political Game Frame (actors from) different nations are grouped into categories of competing camps, and those who are to blame are named: mainly China and the USA. An important subframe that also connects to a conflict paradigm is the Safety/Policing Frame. The seldom employed Global Action Frame adds another nuance, but generally stays within the conflict paradigm, because of the depicted conflict between this approach and the regular politics of the summit. Main findings include the observation that climate change frequently appears as separated from other subjects. It is for instance not discussed in the car supplements, and often appears in supplements of its own. The latter, of course indicates that it is simultaneously seen as an important subject. Domestication and glocalization are two competing tendencies in the material. Glocalization is most often connected to the Issue Frame and domestication to the Political Game Frame, which dominates the material. It is in the domestication parts that we find the few depicted heroes of the summit, thus domestication is also self celebratory.