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The purpose of this paper is to study how the discourse on risk, threat and national security has developed over time within the context of Swedish print news media. The articles we look at are from 1992-2023, and originate from four of Sweden’s largest national newspapers (Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet, Expressen, Svenska Dagbladet). By mapping out when and where something or someone is described as a “threat to national security”, and by whom, we want to analyze how the perceived threats against Sweden as a nation has changed and been communicated over time.

Other than the foundational theory package that is media logic, our theoretical framework includes Ulrich Beck’s concept of risk and risk society, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s propaganda model and the theory of securitization as laid out by the Copenhagen school. Earlier works we have built upon include (among many others) Bakir & Kitzinger’s extensive research on mediated risk, as well as Westberg’s interesting analysis of Sweden’s COVID-19 strategy and its elements of public shaming.

Our study is a quantitative content analysis of a body of 301 articles, with occasional qualitative dives into specific parts of the material to give further context. The media archive and search engine Retriever was used to find every article from the four papers within the chosen timespan containing the phrases “hot mot rikets säkerhet”. (threat to national security) and “hot mot Sveriges säkerhet” (threat to Sweden’s security). The contents of the articles were encoded into several categories pertaining to our four questions, and graphed out to see patterns of frequency over time.

We found a clear and dramatic increase in “threat reporting” from all four newspapers starting in 2017, peaking in 2019 and continuing at a higher level than before. A whole two-thirds of the 301 articles were published in or after 2017. The 2019 peak largely centers on the case of several imams accused of being security threats, which Expressen wrote the most about using the phrases in question. Expressen generally appears the most (103 articles), and Aftonbladet the least (40). Islamism was most commonly pointed out as a threat overall, followed by terrorism and extraparliamentary political action. In almost half of the articles, the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) was the source designating something or someone as a threat. The most common countermeasure after investigation was deportation of the (foreign) threat in question, consistent with there being more articles that point to an individual as the threat (121) rather than another state actor (68).