Danish Media Coverage of 22/7

Abstract

When the two terrorist attacks in Norway took place and the identity of terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik (ABB) was revealed, attention turned to his network relations and shared ideas with Danish radical right wing communities, including the Danish People’s Party. In this article, we focus on ABB’s Danish connections through an analysis of the first 100 days of Danish media coverage. We scrutinised 188 articles in the largest daily newspapers to find out how Danish actors related to ABB’s ideas. The key argument is that the discourses and opinions reflect pre-existing opinions and entrenched positions that have little to do with the event 22/7. Instead, they have everything to do with an attempt to contain domestic adversaries, if not enemies, such as “multiculturalists” and feminists, who were fiercely attacked by rightwingers, while left-wingers saw the radical right wing as the real enemy. At the same time, animosity towards Islam was reproduced leaving the enemy as being a multi-headed monster of Islamists, multiculturalists and feminists

Keywords

• multiculturalism
• muslims
• news media
• effects without causes
• opinion
• tone of debate