Increasingly Controversial, Cultural, and Political: The Immigration Debate in Scandinavian Newspapers 1970–2016

Abstract

Earlier accounts of the immigration debate in Scandinavia have suggested that despite the countries’ many similarities, Swedish newspapers are dominated by immigration friendly views, that Danish papers are very open to strongly negative views on immigration, and that Norwegian press occupies a middle position. However, this argument has until now not been tested through a large systematic, comparative, and historical study of newspaper coverage of immigration in these countries. As a part of the SCANPUB project [https://scanpub.w.uib.no/], a content analysis of a representative sample of articles for two newspapers for each country for the period 1970–2016 (one constructed month pr. year, N = 4329) was done. Focusing on broad Scandinavian trends and major national differences, the results support the general claims about national differences in Scandinavian immigration debate, and also suggest some major developments, in particular the rise of immigration as an issue for debate and for national politicians.

KEYWORDS:

• immigration discourse
• immigrants
• media coverage
• Scandinavia
• news press

Notes

1 Sweden: 1972; Demark: 1973; Norway: 1974.

2 Note that this sample includes op-eds. The exclusion of ordinary letters to the editor in most analyses is a consequence of the large increase in the number of such articles in the period in combination with the many particularities of this genre, including both its form (e.g. often being very short, which means that the items will have fewer subjects and sources), who writes them (“ordinary people” as opposed to bona fide journalists, experts and elites), their looser connection to the daily news agenda, etc. For such reasons, their inclusion in the statistics would heavily distort the longer historical trends of the general editorial coverage.

3 The total codebook had 600 variables. Two questions alone contributed to half of these—one on the location of the immigrants in the text, and one on their nationality. For the full codebook and a methodological report, see Hovden and Mjelde (2019).

4 While leaving out TV news from the analysis might seem like a major weakness, this appears be to less of a problem for the analysis of Scandinavian media systems than elsewhere. First, whereas TV news has traditionally been the most important news source for most people in many places (e.g. in the Mediterranean and Liberal models as described by Hallin and Mancini [2004]), this is not the case in Scandinavia, where newspaper readership has consistently been among the highest in the world (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Second, the small national populations, the late-coming and limited number of commercial national television channels (the first national commercial channels appeared first in the mid-1980s), and the strength of the public broadcasters likely contribute to a largely common news agenda for national TV news and the major national newspapers. In sum, then, we argue that the six newspapers are in our estimation indicative of the changing national and Scandinavian discourses on immigration that have reached a mass audience.

5 While the total number of articles in VG and Aftenposten increased by 37 per cent from 1983 to 2015, the number of articles on immigration debate in the sample for these newspapers increased by 367 per cent. While the number of total articles in Sweden also increased by 37 per cent between 1995 and 2015, the number of immigration articles rose by 167 per cent. Comparable statistics have not been found for the Danish newspapers. Source: Retriever/Atekst.

6 Looking only at the three tabloids (which have not changed newspaper formats in the period) and excluding letters to the editor, the average page length for an immigrant article was between 0,5 and 0,6 pages in the 1970s and 1980s, and has later risen to 0,7 pages in the 1990s, 0,8 pages in the 2000s and 0,9 pages in the 2010s.

7 In total, 42 per cent of the articles had a photo or drawing of an immigrant, and the most notable differences are that Swedish newspapers featured such photographs more often in the 1970s and 1980s, while Denmark had very few such photographs in the 1980s compared to Norway and Sweden.

8 Only 2.6 per cent of the articles are coded as having no explicit or implicit reference to the location of the refugees.

9 Another Scandinavian country is mentioned in 3 per cent of the articles. The same goes for Germany, France and the UK. By contrast, Finland and Iceland—the two remaining Nordic countries—are mentioned in only 0.5 per cent of the articles, which partly reflects the fact that they have had much less immigration than the Scandinavian countries.

Additional information

Funding

This research was jointly supported by Norway's Research Council and the University of Bergen.

Notes on contributors

Jan Fredrik Hovden

Jan Fredrik Hovden is Professor of media studies in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, Bergen University, Norway. Email: [email protected]

Hilmar Mjelde

Hilmar Mjelde (corresponding author) is post doctor in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, Bergen University, Norway.