On this website you can read about whether the 4 biggest newspapers in Sweden are affecting its population’s opinion by using certain words connected to different political parties and wether people are aware of how their political views is impacted by media.
Through a quantitative survey conducted in the month of February to March 2023, various words linked to the policies of four different parties were counted and then compared with the election results for 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 respectively. The parties selected are based on the difference in their core issues; the Social Democrats – health care, school and work, the Green Party – environment/climate and equality, the Moderates – work, taxes and welfare and the Sweden Democrats – immigration policy. Political words that are clearly linked or synonymous with the core issues have also been examined. In total, 6 words linked to S, 7 words linked to MP, 7 words linked to M and 8 words linked to SD were examined.
The result showed that the correlation between using certain words in newspapers and the election result was weaker than previous studies have indicated, despite previous research indicating that the media has a great influence on election campaigns and public opinion.
Since my own survey only covered newspapers as media, this may have led to the result looking different from the previous surveys that were carried out with other conditions. For example, it is known that social media has a great impact on people, especially in recent elections.
To answer the second question six persons were interviewed in six independant qualitative interviews to investigate to what extent their consiousness is regarding medias affect on their political opinions. Majority of them answered that they do know media has an impact on them however there is room to learn more.