Norwegian Newspapers Research Articles

The unwilling foils of the political right: The cultural elite in Swedish and Norwegian newspapers

Using classic elite understandings as our point of departure, we specify the constituent elements and repertoires of the cultural elite as these are described in Swedish and Norwegian newspapers. Through qualitative and quantitative content analyses, we contextualize and compare the cultural elite through five occupational categories and five main themes, and we ask how these characterizations affect the role this elite plays in politics. Also, we suggest a theoretical apparatus for how to link thematic analysis to national cultural repertoires and configurations. We find that there is a higher percentage of references to artists and those with authority over culture production in Sweden than in Norway, while the cultural elite are referred to as academics and culture policy influencers more often in Norway. Another finding is a high level of similarity between the two countries’ view of the cultural elite as snobbish, politically correct, powerful, arrogant and privileged. The study shows that the cultural elite are drawn into a media logic in which they are portrayed as despised adversaries of ordinary people. However, the cultural elite is a more politically contentious label in Sweden than in Norway. The Swedish cultural elite are described as both more cherished and more despised. Moreover, access to membership in the cultural elite is more difficult, and the polarization between the cultural elite and ordinary people is stronger in Sweden.

Contesting scale: A space of the political in a post-disaster context

Disasters create spaces for the political to unfold. This paper contributes to the recurring debates on space and the political in geography by providing a novel empirical focus: following a fire in Lærdal, Norway in 2014, contesting discourses on how emergency services should be spatially organized revealed themselves. A scalar discourse of the local, situated in discourses on periphery and rurality in Norway, emerged to contest a neoliberal discourse promoted by the government. I illustrate the scalar discourse of the local through four identified narratives in Norwegian newspapers that emphasize different aspects of the local. This demonstrates how scalar categories are meshed with everyday vocabulary, and hence are important to study. Although a space of the political was realized following the fire, in the last part of the paper I reflect on why the scalar discourse of the local has not gained recognition as legitimate contestation, as reforms aiming to centralize and/or merge continue to be rolled out in Norway.

Risk Perception through Exemplarity: Hurricanes as Climate Change Examples and Counterexamples in Norwegian News Media

This article explores how hurricanes are used in news media to exemplify the consequences of climate change. This is done by a close reading of Norwegian newspaper articles on the hurricanes Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), Harvey and Irma (both 2017). The geographical distance between the disaster areas and the media audience enables an exploration of how these weather events are made meaningful across long distances, as global concerns. The article shows how these hurricanes are textualized and turned into signs in nature that are pointing towards a climate-changed future, and how they work as modelling examples for imagining the possible disastrous state of such a future. It further argues that reasoning with hurricane examples is a certain kind of risk perception involving a temporal and spatial entwining of the future and the present, that represents a notion of cultural catastrophization by calling upon a fear of an uncontrollable disastrous future. The uses of the hurricane example in news media imply an epistemological shift from probability to exemplarity. This shift provides an argumentative space for climate change skeptics to perform counterarguments that juggle between probability and exemplarity. The article explores how this is done, and how statistics and mentioning of other hurricanes are used to argue that hurricanes Sandy, Harvey and Irma were not extraordinary events in terms of intensity, and thus that they cannot possibly be fueled by climate change. The climate change skeptics’ attempts to claim these hurricanes to be local and normal phenomena, independent of human action, may be regarded as attempts to de-catastrophize contemporary society.

‘This Tragically Obscured Summer’: News Media and Uncertainties of Veracity in the 1928 Nobile/Amundsen Disaster

The summer of 1928 was marked by two internationally reported and disastrous events involving two polar explorers: the crash and rescue of Umberto Nobile’s airship ‘Italia’ in the polar regions of the North Atlantic ocean, and the death of the Roald Amundsen, en route to rescuing Nobile. The article discusses these disasters as indicative of a historical moment in the mediation of events where technological and logistical developments enabled a continuous news coverage of radically remote locations. It argues that these new affordances came with an increased and pervasive sense of uncertainty about the veracity of factual information. Analyzing Norwegian newspaper coverage, the article finds a range of articulations of this uncertainty, including a preoccupation with rumours and speculations, as well as with chronic difficulties in determining factual veracity.

Studying Religion in Nordic Newspapers

This article introduces the topic of this special issue: religion in Nordicnewspapers. It provides a general framework for the following fourarticles based on a longitudinal study of religion in Danish, Finnish,Norwegian, and Swedish newspapers by clarifying what characterizesselected ‘Nordic’ countries, their media spheres, and their religiouslandscapes. Furthermore, this article suggests that despite significantchanges in the media sphere, including factual media production andconsumption, there are good reasons to study religion-related mediacontent produced by the dominant and conventional media outlets,including newspapers. However, this should not be done by isolatingnewspapers from society and the rest of the media. This introductionand the following articles therefore propose that the selected keyconcepts and debates among sociologists of religion are particularlyuseful in thinking about religion-related newspaper content.

Conflictual Diversity and Contested Cultural Heritage: Newspaper Coverage of Religion in Norway 1938–2018

The visibility and diversity of religion in selected Norwegian newspapers published in the capital of Oslo is studied in a quantitativeanalysis at ten-year intervals from 1938 to 2018, with an emphasis onthe last forty years. Recent structural transformations in the newspaper industry and editorial choices cut the number of articles on religionconsiderably in 2018 compared to earlier years. However, the relativevisibility of religion in the share of the total editorial output is fairlystable, at about 1.5 per cent of the content. Rather, the changes havebeen with the diversity and criticism of religion. The representationof Islam has strongly increased, while the newspapers have playeddown the coverage of the Lutheran majority church. The conflictualdiversity and contested cultural heritage in the newspaper material arepartly shaped by the media dynamics in the mediatization of religion.

They Put Themselves Out There: A Longitudinal Study of Organizational Expressiveness

This longitudinal study analyzes organizational expressiveness over a 35-year period. On the basis of 1307 official self-narratives retrieved from employment advertisements published in a major Norwegian newspaper between 1980 and 2015, the study tracks the expression of organizational identity labels over time. It seeks to determine how organizational expressiveness evolves and changes in symbolic meaning, including which overarching identity—the utilitarian or the normative identity—becomes more prevalent over time. Specifically, expressed labels change (1) in terms of their prevalence, suggesting that some labels display increasing long-term trends, whereas others display declining trends, and (2) in terms of their composition and meaning, suggesting that organizations gradually rely on an increasing portfolio of labels to express who they are and what they represent. Over time, these changes weaken the expression of a utilitarian identity, whereas the normative identity is strengthened.

Cultures of anarchy: Images of Russia in the narrative of Norwegian mainstream news media during the Ukraine crisis 2014

This article examines the role of the news media through a case study of the narratives about the 2014 Ukraine crisis in three major Norwegian newspapers. The conflict also contained a ‘war’ between competing strategic narratives from the involved actors, with a potential for cross-national cascades into the Norwegian narrative. The authors’ focus is on the framing of Russia during the most dramatic month of March 2014. They applied the images related to Wendt’s cultures of anarchy (see Social Theory of International Politics, 1999) to classify the framing of Russia. The Norwegian media narrative was relatively consistent in framing Russia as choosing a path leading away from being a rival of Norway and the West, towards becoming their enemy. This was close to the narrative of the Norwegian government and in clear opposition to the Russian narrative. While this supports Hoskins and O’Loughlin’s ‘arrested war’ hypothesis (published in Information, Communication & Society, 2015), it also raises questions about professional media norms.

Performing Sport Political Legitimacy: A Cultural Sociology Perspective on Sport Politics

This paper concerns the performance of sport politics. We carry out a text analysis of a year-long media debate that raged in Norwegian newspapers throughout 2016. After the Medias had critiqued ho...

Representations of child welfare services in Norwegian, Danish and German newspapers

Child welfare services are often scrutinized in media reports, but few comparisons of how services are represented in different countries are available. The aim of this article is to assess whether systematic differences in the representation of child welfare services in Norwegian, Danish and German newspapers can be documented. A content analysis of major newspapers in each country revealed considerable differences among the countries. While Norwegian and German child welfare services are mostly presented as implementing adequately severe and timed interventions, their Danish counterparts are heavily criticized for a complete lack of interventions and for implementing interventions too late or not at all. In none of the three countries, interventions of child welfare services are in the reviewed newspapers presented particularly as too severe or too early. The cooperation with other welfare services is described mostly as neutral or negative in Norwegian newspapers, as positive, neutral or negative in German ones and not at all in most Danish articles. Cultural sensitivity in interventions is in the newspaper coverage of all three countries characterized mostly by an omission of the topic altogether. The comparative indicators applied in this study are suggested as powerful tools for further comparisons.

Covering Regional Blind Spots: Commentary journalism in the regional public sphere

Abstract A significant trend within journalism is the growth of the commentary genre. Another trend is the regional withdrawal within news journalism. News media are closing down district offices, which raises concerns over media shadows and blind spots in coverage. This article addresses both of these trends through a case analysis of the Norwegian newspaper Nordlys. Launching its commentary innovation Nordnorsk debatt, Nordlys aims to exceed its geographical area within these columns, facilitating a regional public sphere in the Arctic region. The article discusses the role of opinion-based journalism in the regional public sphere, within the theoretical perspective of media ecology and institutional theory. We argue that covering the regional level in society is a vital part of journalism’s institutional role. In addition, from an ecological perspective, the role of being a regional voice is important in the national public sphere.

When the Personal Is Always Political: Norwegian Muslims’ Arguments for Women’s Rights

For almost two decades, the public debate about Islam in Western Europe has been dominated by concerns about the lack of gender equality in the racialized Muslim population. There has been a tendency to victimize “the Muslim woman” rather than to encourage Muslim women’s participation in the public debate about their lives. This contribution to the study of discourses on Muslim women is an analysis of arguments written by Muslims about women’s rights. The data consists of 239 texts written by self-defined Muslims in major Norwegian newspapers about women’s rights. I will discuss two findings from the study. The first is an appeal to be personal when discussing issues of domestic violence and racism is combined with an implicit and explicit demand to represent all Muslims in order to get published in newspapers—which creates an ethno-religious threshold for participation in the public debate. The second finding is that, across different positions and different religious affiliations, from conservative to nearly secular, and across the timeline, from 2000 to 2012, there is a dominant understanding of women’s rights as individual autonomy. These findings will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives to explore how arguments for individual autonomy can both challenge and amplify neoliberal agendas.

The effect of direct press support on the diversity of news content in Norway

ABSTRACTThe main question of this article is to what extent state financial support systems contribute to the diversity of topics in online news. Hereunder we investigate the impact of direct press support on the diversity of online news in Norway. The analysis applies LDA (Latent Dirichlet allocation) on a corpus of 726,889 computationally gathered news articles from 160 Norwegian newspapers collected October–December 2015 and 2016. Results show a proportionate degree of variety, balance, and disparity between topics in the Norwegian news landscape. While press supported newspapers give relatively higher attention to local politics and rural industries, overall, direct production support primarily supports pluralism aims by sustaining a heterogeneous newspaper structure.

Female Voices in the News: Structural Conditions of Gender Representations in Norwegian Newspapers

The article presents a hybrid analysis combining manual content analysis of 9,131 sources in 5,544 news stories across 75 publications, with computational gender recognition producing 551,102 names from 320,228 articles across 125 newspapers. The article investigates the significance of structural features for the presence of women in the news. Results show female sources are only equal to men as ordinary citizens and children, and only in lifestyle content. Among the structural features examined, only local distribution and a circulation less than 5,000 exhibit improvements in female representation. Ownership, distribution frequency, market position, and direct press support had little or no effect.

‘Friends call me racist’: Experiences of repercussions from writing comments on newspaper websites

Based on a survey among contributors to the online comments sections of four Norwegian newspapers, we investigate the following research question: How do contributors describe their experiences of repercussions from writing comments on newspaper websites? Employing quantitative and qualitative analyses, we explore the influence of four variables: gender, anonymity, attitudes toward editorial policies and issue controversy. We find no influence from gender. However, regarding attitudes we find that the experience of repercussions is particularly prevalent among those who oppose strict editorial control with regard to reader comments, as well as among respondents who write comments on a radical right-wing website. Studying free-form answers which describe incidents of repercussions experienced by the respondents we find no sign of gender differences, but rather a strong dominance of statements related to issue controversies, and particularly regarding immigration and Islam.

Let me grow old and senile in peace: Norwegian newspaper accounts of voice and agency with dementia

ABSTRACTThis study analyses the remaking of dementia as a social and cultural phenomenon in the public media discourse in a welfare state Norway. A content analysis was carried out of articles on dementia published in Norwegian paper media from 1995 to 2015. The study combined the tools from quantitative corpus analyses and qualitative critical discourse analyses, making it possible to detect and interpret diachronic changes in the dementia discourse. Although the main focus in Norwegian dementia discourse has changed from the disease to the personhood, the agents defining what it means to live well with dementia continued to be predominantly institutional: non-governmental organisations, municipalities, health-care institutions and politicians. An analysis of the uses of the politically incorrect Norwegian term for dementia, ‘senility’, revealed that this term offered an alternative to the institutionalised dementia discourse and functioned as an unconventional and therapeutic-free space where older people and persons with dementia could use humour to subvert these norms and power relations.

The Prime Minister of Antarctica: entrenching territory through journalistic travelogues

ABSTRACTThis article discusses how sovereignty can be entrenched through the interplay between texts and actions. The case is the coverage of the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s travels to Antarctica by one Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten. Through a close reading, the article shows how two newspaper articles by the journalist Ole Mathismoen strengthen the connections between Norway and one of its territorial claims in Antarctica while simultaneously obscuring other nations’ presence. Thus, the travelogues provide a setting for sovereignty performances by the Prime Minister, which naturalises and depoliticises his actions. The article applies the concept of imaginative geographies to illuminate relations between journalism and geopolitics. By looking at the example of Norway’s presence in Antarctica, it explores how the performance of imaginative geographies functions as the entrenchment of territorial claims.

Svanhild Naterstad, “To me Romania is magic!”

Svanhild Naterstad has worked as a journalist for the Norwegian newspaper Adresseavisen in Trondheim since 2002. In addition to journalism studies at the Bodø University College, she holds a Magister’s degree (corresponding to the PhD) in Romanian literature from the Institute of Classical and Romance Studies of the University of Oslo (1996). In the period January 2009-October 2010, she was employed at the Department of Modern Foreign Languages of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), which at that time hosted the only Romanian Lectureship in Norway, with financial support from Romania’s honorary consul in Trondheim, Mr. Terje Roll Danielsen. In 2012 she published the book Romania in Norwegian, at the Akademika Publishing House. After her first visit to Romania in 1988, she lived in Bucharest, during a research visit (1990-1991) and in Copşa Mică, where she worked as an interpreter between 1991-1992. Moreover, she had other stays of 1-3 months in Romania, related to her university studies and the research for the book Romania. This is an extensive book of 456 pages, which offers the Norwegian readers various information about Romania’s history, geography, nature, economy, culture, religion etc.

Assessing “The Regulars”—and Beyond

Commenting on online news articles must be considered an online staple—an established practice among news consumers that is currently being funnelled from the Web pages of news organizations to third-party platforms such as Facebook. The paper at hand adopts an exploratory approach and provides insights into the fervency and popularity of commentators and comments on the Facebook pages of two Swedish and two Norwegian newspapers. The results indicate that while immigration issues are a common topic in both countries, the Swedish context stands out by also featuring high degrees of commenting activity in relation to issues of gender equality. Identifying a series of differences in how these opportunities to comment on news are used in each country, the Swedish context appears to offer a wider range of opinions among the most fervent commentators in comparison with Norway. A similar tendency is found among the most “liked” comments.

Rituals that helped heal a nation after a terror attack

In this article, the authors describe rituals that helped the Norwegian society heal after a terror attack. Through a brief review of the international research literature and a qualitative document analysis of Norwegian newspaper articles and an Internet news site, we identified a list of rituals that were organized spontaneously in response to a deadly terror attack in Norway on the 22nd July 2011 this tragedy. We divided the rituals into six overarching groups that emphasize different socio-psychological phases related to crisis response and recovery. These phases refer to reactions such as experiencing shock, counting our losses, saying farewell, searching for justice, moving on, and rebuilding. We postulate that rituals could potentially help heal a nation, thereby enabling it to move on. We conclude this article by discussing what professional helpers and volunteer staff might have learned from this event.