| Summary: | The way in which media discusses religion has changed over time. Due to the separation of state and church in 2000, the Swedish state to a lesser extent legitimizes its political ruling with references to religious concepts. As a result, a higher tolerance towards religious minorities can be said to have taken place. This is an ambiguous change however, where critique raised towards religious practices and expressions of minorities also occurs to a higher extent. The public debate is in large part conducted through the media, but is also seen to be produced and reproduced through the media’s discourse. The aim of this study is to examine the way in which Islam, and Muslims by extension, are portrayed in editorials of two of Sweden’s largest broadsheet papers, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. The study takes a deductive approach, and uses a qualitative text analysis with inspiration from discourse theory to examine the editorials with the help of three theories. The first one is social representations theory as applied by Birgitta Höijer to media studies, the second is Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, and the last is Edward Said’s Orientalism. The analysis shows that there are indicators of orientalist manifestations in the discourse regarding Islam, and Muslims by extension. This is mainly demonstrated through emotional anchoring as well as anchoring through antinomies. The orientalist manifestations apply to Said’s first and fourth dogma, where Islam and its different expressions are perceived as being at odds with the alleged democratic society. The analysis suggests that, in their role as producers of social representations and collective cognitions, the editorials included in this study withhold recognition from Islam as a collective identity and culture.
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