News coverage of the war in Gaza : A qualitative idea analysis on how Sweden’s two biggest newspapers covered the war between Israel and Palestine during the fall of 2023.

This essay aims to explore and analyse how the war between Israel and Palestine was described in the editorial pages of Sweden’s two biggest newspapers, beginning with the attack October 7th and fifteen days forward. It also aims to explore what possible political knowledge could be interpreted by the reader from the editorial pages. This is based in part on previous research done within journalistic studies that show how framing within news coverage play a big role in how people perceive current events. It is also based on previous research done within the field of education that show a lack of knowledge regarding news and current events on the part of civics teachers, as well as a lacking implementation of news within civic and citizen education. In a hermeneutic and empirical study, the editorial pages of the news papers Dagens Nyheter (DN) and Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) during the period October 8 – October 24. The results of the study show that both papers frame the conflict as being one between a civilised actor and one uncivilised one. Both papers broadly paint one party in the conflict, Hamas, as barbaric and a force that should be condemned but also is in part representative of Gaza as a whole. The study also shows that the editorial pages legitimize and support Israel in their military endeavours against Hamas. Little time is spent on reporting on the escalating situation in Gaza at the time. However, one of the papers, DN, do sway towards reporting and criticising Israel’s previous and current actions towards Gaza. Whereas SvD spends much time justifying said previous and current actions done by Israel. The results were analysed using a discourse analysis with the aim to showcase the paper’s underlying values and judgements regarding the conflict and its constituent parts. This analysis breaks down the text in variables based on value-based statements that are meant to demonstrate the text’s underlying opinions. To simplify the understanding and framing of the newspapers, this study put these statements and opinions within the framework of three overarching questions: “how does the paper describe what has happened?”, “how does the paper describe the causes to what has happened”, and “how does the paper describe what should happen now?” It is suggested within this essay that civics teachers could utilize this method of analysis and the results of the analysis to aid them when incorporating the controversial question regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine when educating in their subject.