The establishing of subject positions in Swedish news media discourses during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has dominated the global media since 2020. To a large extent, it is via the news media that the public has learned about the risks, levels of danger, governmental regulations and mandatory actions. This article highlights the subject positions constructed by the Swedish news media from January 2020 to February 2021 in reports about the pandemic. The result shows that citizens can be active-passive or solitary solidarity, these positions appeal to individual accountability, thus potentially shaping and fostering citizens in line with the Swedish government’s wider response to the pandemic. The news media’s images are of self-regulated citizens who govern and discipline themselves and others according to the current discourses, all of which simultaneously evoke fear, togetherness and hope. The ideological dilemmas for citizens are whether to be active-passive or, if necessary, switch to the solitary solidarity subject position.

COVID-19 and figures of blame: Discursive representations of blame for COVID-19 and its impacts in UK online news

“…Finally, while the UK government was most prominent, we also found that the public and the individual were constructed as figures of blame. This aligns with findings of the research examining media discourse in Sweden that found that news coverage adopted positions that accentuate individual accountability during COVID-19 (Lövenmark et al, 2023). While this may be reflective of the wider public health messaging around COVID-19, for example those that stressed the importance of individual preventative behaviours, it may also deflect from institutional and organisational accountability in the UK’s pandemic response.…”

“…Those that criticised travel restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19 argued that they contributed to such stigma and xenophobia by reinforcing the social construction of COVID-19 as a foreign invasion (Logie and Turan, 2020). Other analyses of news media coverage of COVID-19 identified the prominence of fear and scaremongering frames (Ogbodo et al, 2020), the amplification of future risks (Rooke, 2021) and the adoption of positions that appeal to individual accountability (Lövenmark et al, 2023).…”

“…While there is emergent research evidence on the attribution of blame during the early phase of the pandemic, in particular the initial outbreak (Lövenmark et al, 2023; Ogbodo et al, 2020; Phillips et al, 2021; Rooke, 2021), and the dynamics of blame attribution on social media (Choli and Kuss, 2021; Nguyen et al, 2021), limited attention has been paid to understanding blame in subsequent waves of the virus and as countries attempted to respond to the pandemic. Our study, therefore, seeks to consider the figures of blame beyond the early phase of the pandemic, which as established is often characterised by externalising blame, to consider subsequent waves of the virus and the UK’s response to the crisis.…”

Being forced into an unsustainable and unethical working situation while caring for older people during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden

“…Lethin et al (20) suggested that the media may even have in uenced the politicians in this matter. It could also be the other way around, namely that the media publications re ected the dominant political views (44).…”