Editorial and Cultural Debates in Danish and Swedish Newspapers: Understanding the Terror Attacks in Paris and Copenhagen in Early 2015

• In Event: Global News Media Processes: Deliberation, Participation and Marketization

Abstract

This paper investigates opinion material from Swedish and Danish newspapers after the terror attacks in Paris and Copenhagen in early 2015, conveying similarities and differences between Swedish and Danish material and between editorial/op-ed and cultural opinion articles. Who voices opinions in what genres? What conflicts and contexts are evoked? Who is pictured as “other”, and how are relationships to “others” imagined: ending in consensus, conflictual co-existence, or as if co-existence is impossible with alleged enemies? Theoretically we detail agonistic democracy, and deliberative and antagonistic approaches. Quantitatively we map genres, debaters, etc. Qualitatively we analyze: polarizations, key concepts, reference-points, linguistic registers. Conclusions: editorials, particularly Danish, often display one-sided stereotypical polarizing antagonistic world-views, and tendencies to abandoning previous multicultural approaches are detected in Swedish articles, while (particularly Swedish) cultural opinion articles evoke conflictual co-existence, drawing on multiple cultural/political/philosophical contexts, thereby underlining cultural journalisms’ crucial role for agonistic democracy in a globalizing world.

Authors

• Nete Noergaard Kristensen

• Anna Roosvall, Stockholm U