Till Örebro universitet

The purpose of this essay is to examine how peace journalism was expressed in Swedish newspapers´ reporting on the war in Georgia 2008. We did this by analyzing whether the reporting was elite- or people-orientated depending on how suffering was expressed and how the war players were described.

The method we used was Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It was applied on news articles from four Swedish newspapers that covered three different happenings in the war in Georgia.

We found out that the reporting was mainly elite-orientated, both when it comes to how suffering was expressed, as well as how the war players were described. The newspapers tended to focus on only one party’s suffering and one party as evil-doer, which is elite-orientated reporting and also an indication of war journalism rather than peace journalism.