“Tusen och en ohyggligheter” : Aftonbladets och Dagens Nyheters gestaltning av det armeniska folkmordet under åren 1915 till 1917

Sammanfattning

Media representations of violence and genocide play a crucial role in shaping public understandings of historical events. A broad scholarly consensus holds that Armenians and other Christian minority groups in the late Ottoman Empire were subjected to genocide during the First World War. Although Sweden remained neutral during the war, the Swedish press became an arena for propaganda and opinion formation influenced by the warring powers. Against this background, and in light of the influence that the warring powers exerted on the Swedish press despite Sweden’s neutrality, it becomes relevant to analyze how two major Swedish newspapers portrayed the Armenian Genocide between 1915 and 1917. The aim of the study was to examine how Swedish newspapers contributed to the construction of understandings of the violence against Armenians between 1915 and 1917 by analyzing the reporting in Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter and relating it to the newspapers’ respective sympathies during the First World War. The research questions focus on how the ongoing violence against Armenians was portrayed in Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter between 1915 and 1917 in terms of problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluations, and proposed solutions; what similarities and differences can be identified between the newspapers’ portrayals, and how can these be understood in relation to their sympathies during the war; and what understandings of the violence against Armenians were enabled through the portrayals presented by Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on the newspaper’s, using the framing theory as the theoretical framework. In order to address the study’s aim the material was categorized into the four dimensions of framing theory: problems, causes, moral evaluations, and solutions. The results show that the newspapers’ portrayals of the ongoing genocide against Armenians differed depending on which side of the war they sympathized with. Dagens Nyheter’s reporting was characterized by a clear victim-centered portrayal of Armenians, whereas Aftonbladet conveyed a more relativizing representation of the genocide. Through different moral, political, and causal portayals, similar events were given different meanings depending on the newspapers’ international sympathies. The study shows that media power lies not only in what is reported, but also in how events are made meaningful to readers.