| Summary: | The purpose of this study is to examine in which way two Swedish tabloid newspapers, Aftonbladet and Expressen, most commonly frame gambling in the news coverage on their websites in a time when research reveals that it has become increasingly harder to determine what is journalistic material and what is advertisement. At the same time, gambling companies have taken over a large part of the advertising space at Swedish tabloid websites. There has, in its extent, been done insufficient research within the journalistic field of news coverage when it comes to gambling and this study seeks to fill in some of the investigative blanks. In order to analyze how frames emerge from the news coverage we collected articles from a six-month period, as close to the initiation of the study as possible, by using eight different words or short phrases that led to the total empirical data of 302 news articles. Methodologically the study uses quantitative content analysis mainly based on the theory of framing. Furthermore, we also apply the theoretical aspects of agenda setting and news selection. The result clearly shows that the Swedish tabloid newspapers frame gambling in a positive and non-problematic way and there is a remarkable over representation of articles that are based on what we call “the happy winner frame”. In the conclusion we discuss both social and media related implications of the newspapers way of framing gambling in their online news coverage. We also offer a couple of propositions for future research within this field of medial science.
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