Reporting about Iraq: International Law in the Media during Armed Conflict

This article applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the Swedish print media’s portrayal of international lawduring the war in Iraq: The author focused on if and how standards of international law were representedin the Swedish media discourse between 20 March and 10 June 2003. The material that has been analysedconsists of articles from four Swedish newspapers, the morning papers Svenska Dagbladet and DagensNyheter and the evening papers Expressen and Aftonbladet, all being the leading national papers in Sweden.At the initial stage forty-five articles were schematically analysed for the purpose of defining the problemarea. At the second stage, the fifteen identified news articles were analysed in depth. This paper will arguethat ‘human rights’ appear in the media discourse abstractly, and thus often misrepresent the human rightsobligations of states. In contrast, in the few instances where humanitarian law is indeed presented in thearticles, it is, to a large extent, done concretely and with explicit reference to the relevant legal provisions.