Martin Karlsson

Martin Karlsson began his PhD program in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Media Studies in the autumn of 2015. Martin has a great interest in media, culture and history. He graduated with his Master's thesis Struggling Nation (2015 ), where he explored the representation of Russian refugees who arrived Sweden in 1906 in three Stockholm newspapers. In his thesis project, Martin continues in a similar vein by studying the representation of protests for democracy and political rights in television news between the 1960s and today.

Martin is particularly interested in the forms and conditions of politics in media through history, and what can and should be expressed during different periods. This is an interest that can be found in Martin’s Master’s thesis about the Swedish partypress, and that continuities in his ongoing PhD project about Swedish public service journalism.

Martin’s research compares the representation of protest in Swedish public service journalism during different years between 1965 and 2015. The aim is to illuminate how the relationship between journalistic institutional integrity and public service policy has been managed in news items about protest during different treaty periods between the Swedish public service company and the Swedish state. The source material mainly consists of news broadcasts from the program Aktuellt, but also public enquiries and other documents in which public service policy has been drafted, determined and interpreted through the years. An important theoretical point of departure for the study, is the critique, forwarded by Mouffe and others, against what has been perceived as an increasing conformity of public debate. This motivates a more nuanced discussion about the regulation of journalism, in Sweden and elsewhere, after WWII, to which this study can make a contribution.