“Don't trust the media – it costs lives.”: A corpus linguistic study of the mainstream media criticism and deplatforming discussion in the Swedish far-right alternative media
2021 (Swedish)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year)), 10 credits / 15 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
This study investigates how the Swedish far-right alternative media's criticize the Swedish mainstream media and discusses the contemporary phenomenon of “deplatforming”. Deplatforming refers to when a user or uploaded content is banned from a social media platform. The study investigates linguistic features of these questions, through the method of corpus linguistics and the software AntConc. Altogether, 72515 tokens from four Swedish online far-right alternative media are analyzed, showing that the far-right alternative media criticize the mainstream media in a highly politicized way, posing a binary antagonist relationship where power is a central theme. Regarding deplatforming, the study shows how the Swedish far-right alternative media focus on deplatforming especially when it regards far-right activists or politicians, and then have a jeering attitude towards the given reasons for the seclusion. The study also includes a theoretical discussion, wherein the chosen Swedish far-right alternative media showed an overestimation of the power and influence of the mainstream media (as theoreticized by Nick Couldy, 2014). Likewise, the scrutinized data showed signs of relational anti-systemness (as theoreticized by Kristoffer Holt, 2018).
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021. , p. 72
Keywords [en]
far-right alternative media, mainstream media, media criticism, social media, deplatforming, “the myth of the mediated centre”, anti-systemness, public service, corpus linguistics
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics Media and Communication Studies Media and Communication Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-46692OAI: oai:DiVA.org:sh-46692DiVA, id: diva2:1609335
Subject / course
Journalism
Uppsok
Social and Behavioural Science, Law
Supervisors
Examiners
2021-11-092021-11-082025-02-17Bibliographically approved