This article addresses how class as a category of conflict and struggle is understood and shaped discursively in mainstream media today. We utilise a case study of how Swedish news media represents the long-lasting conflict in the Swedish labour market between the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union and the employer organisation, Sweden's Ports. Using critical discourse analysis, we show two ways in which class relations are recontextualised in three Swedish newspapers. One is through obscuring class and centring the conflict around business and nationalist discourses, which in the end legitimise a corporate perspective. The other, more marginalised, way is through the critique of class relations that appears in subjective discourse types. This handling of class, we argue, serves the reproduction of a post-political condition.

The aim of this critical discourse analysis is to examine how the agenda and actions of the global protest movement ‘Youth for Climate’ are understood and constructed in Swedish mainstream press and to highlight how the journalistic recontextualization contributes to empowering and disempowering the critical voices and their demands. The article problematizes the journalistic ideal of objectivity in the case of the climate crisis and adds to discussions about the role of media and journalism in the political dynamics surrounding various responses and solutions to the crisis. It suggests that journalism’s objectivity claim hampers the journalistic coverage–what stories can be told and how. This suggestion is based on findings that show how journalism neutralizes conflict and social critique by emptying it of its political content and incorporating it into consensus discourses as well as by focusing on a moral pseudo-struggle that allows journalism to cover conflict without acknowledging real political controversies. It is argued here that journalism contributes to disempowering the climate protests by means of evasive, transformative and emptying discursive strategies.

This article examines sustainable development discourses while addressing the unsustainable structures within which these discourses take place. The main research question concerns how sustainability is understood in relation to class and capitalism and what ideologies are expressed as neutral in the anodyne context of public information. Critical discourse analysis is applied as a method to examine how sustainable development is shaped through the construction of problems, responsibilities and solutions in a Swedish municipal magazine. The analysis reveals two parallel constructions: hyper-politicised discourses about free enterprise and a trivialisation of discourses about socio-economic challenges. Texts about social care and social responsibility are represented in the form of banal politics, transforming conflict into consensus, while stories about the business sector rely heavily on market rationales stressing the importance of political intervention to increase the attractive power of entrepreneurialism. Taking Critical Theory as its starting point, the analysis discusses the neoliberal paradox, namely that in the neoliberal political regime, despite the rhetoric of individualism and freedom, the role of the state is to support private enterprises. The article argues that the role of communication needs further analytical attention to increase our understanding of how sustainability is shaped and established in mainstream public discourse. It concludes that the specific communication practice examined here promotes neoliberal capitalism by encouraging the continued unsustainable class structuring of our society. © 2019, Unified Theory of Information Research Group. All rights reserved.