The overall purpose of this paper is to examine and compare how leading Swedish news media in television and the press covered and described the terrorist attacks in the USA on September 11 in 2001, the US attacks on Afghanistan later in 2001 and the war in Iraq in 2003. The paper examines factors influencing news decisions and media ability to maintain fair news reporting. The study looks specifically at the sources that are used, the occurence of speculations and whether the coverage were anti-American or anti-Muslim. The central questions are:• What were the most frequently used sources?• How frequent were different types of speculations?• How frequent were anti-American and anti-Muslim rhetorical figures respectively?