"De står tillsammans och försöker förstå det ofattbara"

The aim of this Master thesis was to examine news journalism covering expressions of mourning related to violent or unexpected deaths. What rituals for mourning are brought out in media and do media present guidance to how mourners should behave? The questions examined were: What characterised news events that leaded to texts on expressions of mourning? How was grief framed? Which narrative patterns were there in the texts? How was the deceased represented? How were the mourners represented? 165 texts, from Swedish daily newspapers, covering 93 different news events were analysed. The methods were mainly discourse analysis with focus on identities and relations, but also semiotic analysis with focus on staging and symbols and narrative analysis with focus on patterns for storytelling. The result showed that a news story about ordinary people expressing their feelings of grief has elements of melodrama. The news story is based on the myth of the victim, and formed as a typical story where equilibrium is disturbed when the inconceivable happens and the mourners can by their actions restore equilibrium. The paradigms behind are the oppositeslife ? death and good ? evil.  The deceased is represented as a victim in a mythic sense. The most important qualities of a victim are youth, innocence and goodness. The victim is framed as a person we could sympathise and identify with. The mourners in the texts praise the victim and sanctify the place where the victim died with candles, roses and notes. The mourners are essential to the story; they create identification and an identity that include us as readers in a community and a discourse of mourning and mourners. The ordinary people who appear as mourners in the texts are relatives and close friends of the victim, but also mourning tourists, media chosen friends and anonymous women who are represented, in a stereotypical way, as the professional female mourner who weep over the deceased. In some texts celebrities appear as mourners of ordinary people, and they personalize how the distinction between public and private is erased in popular journalism. They also might give a kind of legitimacy to the way media frame the story about ordinary people mourning the innocent victim. Some texts had a partly diverging story. If the victim, in some aspect, could not be framed as innocent the paradigm good ? evil became problematic. When victims or mourners had foreign origin the contrast us ? them was added.  In some texts the ethical code for Swedish journalists was disregarded, mainly by publishing information on ethnicity or by interviewing children and people in shock

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