Abstract
How are chemicals framed in the press in Sweden and in Poland? We have conducted interviews with journalists representing local press, tabloids and national newspapers in order to grasp the professionals’ own narratives about chemicals and also the range of diversity within journalism. What at first can appear as a marginalized topic, chemicals, partly because it is not an established journalistic genre, has turned out to have many faces. All news treating additives in food production and every report relating to medicines, such as the growing resistance towards antibiotics among the population, is part of the discourse, not to mention accidental releases of hazardous substances, etc. Secondly, it is a central part of the study to understand how these dominant themes are textually constructed in the press coverage. The news and media debate about chemicals are not only a central information source for the majority of citizens; the mass media also influence stakeholders, opinion-leaders and decision-makers in society. By and large the results indicate that the types of frames that are used by journalists in these two countries have a lot in common, even if the content of the media texts and the specific national contexts differ substantially between Sweden and Poland.
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Notes
- 1.
These three spheres – science, politics and media – have been studied simultaneously in the interdisciplinary research programme Regulating Chemicals in the Baltic Sea Area: Science, Politics and the Media, led by Dr. Michael Gilek, Södertörn University College, with support from The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen). Apart from the research group, we especially thank Vanni Tjernström, Maritha Jacobsson and our colleagues at the Department of Culture and Media, Umeå University for constructive comments on earlier drafts of the manuscripts, and Martin Shaw for revising the English.
- 2.
Reach is discussed in greater depth in Chapters 5, 6 and 13 in this volume.
- 3.
Sweden joined the EU in 1995 and Poland in 2004.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
However, comparative studies, including cross-cultural analysis of news coverage, are common within the field of political communication. For an overview of this research tradition see Tjernström (2001).
- 7.
As a starting point in formulating the search profile, we consulted our interdisciplinary research group of scientists and took guidance from a recently published book (Johansson 2006) that maps out and discusses the diverse chemical field.
- 8.
- 9.
Only one of the persons in our research team speaks Polish, and that person has, therefore, conducted all the interviews with the Polish journalists.
- 10.
The list of key words was chemical, pollution, Reach, sweetener, heavy metal, lead and food additive.
- 11.
On average, each interview has lasted about 1 h. Each of them has been recorded as well as transcribed (the Polish also translated into English). For practical reasons, the interviews with Polish journalists have been conducted over the phone. The results (as compared to the four earlier interviews, mostly conducted at the workplaces of the Swedish journalists) were not much different. We believe that this was due to the type of interview (semi-structured) and also to the subject (chemicals/environmental reporting), which all of the reporters had a lot of knowledge about and could easily relate to.
- 12.
The group of Swedish journalists work at Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet (the second largest morning newspaper in Sweden), Aftonbladet and Västerbottens-Kuriren. From Poland we have interviewed one reporter from each of Gazeta Wyborca, Rzeczpospolita, Dzienik and Glos Pomorza.
- 13.
Texts with a weak connection to the subject, i.e. in which chemicals are mentioned only en passant or in which the dominant topic of the text is something very different, have been excluded from this part of the analysis.
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Sjölander, A.E., Boström, K.W., Ögren, K. (2010). Framing Chemical Risks in Sweden and Poland: Journalists’ Narratives and Media Texts. In: Eriksson, J., Gilek, M., Rudén, C. (eds) Regulating Chemical Risks. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9428-5_4
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