Mid Sweden University

Classic agenda-setting and news framing research focuses on traditional media producers; journalists, editors, professional communicators. However, the personalization of politics and journalism, as well as the rise of social media, is creating new spaces for other actors (McCombs et al., 2014; Ninković-Slavnić, 2016). When media consumption becomes more fragmented, and news are circulated more than distributed, alternative opinion leaders such as comedians might be more influential. The growing impact of humor in the daily news cycle, especially regarding the younger generations, thus makes comedians an important object of study (Abel and Barthel, 2013; Wohn and Bowe, 2016). Previous studies have established that entertainment media have agenda-setting functions just as news media, that political comedy can have incidental persuasive effects with entertainment seekers and that political humor may increase political awareness among apolitical audiences (Greenwood et al., 2016: 2016; Holbrook and Hill, 2005; Shah et al., 2012). The current paper builds on this development and compares how professional comedians frame news and current affairs with how traditional journalists frame similar news. The study is performed via content analysis of Swedish political satire radio shows and podcasts compared with journalistically framed Swedish news media coverage. It will have a combined quantitative and qualitative approach with the first mapping the topics discussed and types of frames used, and the second more thoroughly looking at how the comedians address international politics in relation to national politics. Preliminary results of the quantitative part show that the comedic framing is more thematic while traditional news framing is more episodic. Journalistic reporting is more often on an individual level while comedic commentary is more often on a societal level. The comedic framing is also more personal and emotional, while the dominant tonality is difficult to decode because of common comedic approaches such as irony and ridicule. The framing is similar between the two occupations when it comes to timeliness; they both mostly handle current events as opposed to historical or future events. When looking at most addressed news topics the comedians tackled politics, entertainment, media and social issues while traditional journalists reported more on culture and crime.