”Det sitter i ryggmärgen” : En studie om visualisering av krisjournalistik i svenska teve-nyheter

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how journalistic news values are visualized in crisis reporting in the Swedish television news. The material is chosen with a sampling technique that is referred to as stratified selection, and provides the thesis with 70 newscasts to analyze. A crisis can be defined as a pandemic, act of terror, violence and more. Since the five main crisis situations represented in the thesis differentiate in their characteristics, there has been a distinguishing between acute and developing crisis. Regarding the methodological section, a prestudy with quantitative measurements was made to help the identification of valuable themes, that were later analyzed with a qualitative method to widen the perspective of crisis reporting. To answer the research questions of the thesis, a visual semiotic analysis was added. The use of a visual semiotic analysis contributed to an understanding of four chosen and mainly representative images. By using semiotic tools, such as denotation, connotation, symbolic, index, and iconic, the method helped locate and describe signs with underlying meanings. The thesis concludes that news values, such as elites, cultural closeness and compositing often occurs in acute crisis reporting. Some of the criterias are visualized through shaky videotaping that connotes drama and intensification. This can be explained with the news media's usage of eyewitnessed images in situations where media themselves lack material to portray the very beginning of a chaotic situation. Another result concerns the theme infographic, because of its purpose to create closeness by visually marking distances. Looking at journalistic strategies gives a deeper understanding of journalistic choices concerning their visual crisis reporting.