Stig Arne Nohrstedt

Stig A. Nohrstedt is professor emeritus in media and communication and retired since June 2013. Still active researcher with a number of publications since the retirement. He has a PhD. in political science from Uppsala University and is docent in mass Communication and journalism at Göteborg University. 

Nohrstedt has been conducting research in various areas such as journalism ethics, war and peace journalism, media and structural discrimination, risk and emergency communication since the 1980s at the Örebro University. He coordinated studies on behalf of the National Board of Psychological Defence on the Swedish media reporting and inter-agency communication in connection with the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident 1986, the loss of the ferry Estonia in 1994 and on the Kosovo conflict in 1999.

In collaboration with colleagues at universities in Gothenburg, Stockholm, Sundsvall and Örebro he coordinated the research project “Journalistic Norms”, financed by the HSFR research council, in which the ethical practice in Swedish newsrooms was explored. The findings were published 1996 in the final report Journalistikens etiska problem (The Ethical Problem of Journalism).

In 1992 a series of war journalism studies started with the project “Journalism in the New World Order”, an international project with funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, on media reporting from the Gulf War 1990/91 in six countries. The project was reported in two volumes Journalism in the New World Order I and II (2001; 2002). Both in connection with the terrorist attacks in September 2001 and the subsequent invasion in Afghanistan as well as the Iraq war 2003 follow-up studies were published in international volumes, and New Wars, New Media and New War Journalism (2014) is summing up the historical lessons from this longitudinal research. In other texts, published as book chapters, analyses of the NATO/US military attacks on journalists and media from the Kosovo conflict onwards have been conducted as well as discussions of the problems for war journalism to perform the fourth estate role in a sustainable way in the new wars. Another topis dealt with in several texts is peace journalism as an alternative to traditional war journalism.

Besides the above mention projects Nohrstedt has also studied risk and crisis communication in relation to Xenophobia and right wing extremism. He coordinated a project about how the “Others” were portrayed in the Swedish media on behalf of the Commission on Structural Discrimination, which was reported in Mediernas vi och dom (Us and Them in the Media) (SOU 2006:21). With a similar focus he has later contributed with an article on the media reporting of the Muhammad cartoon cases in Denmark and Sweden for a volume, Right-Wing Populism in Europe (2013) edited by Wodak, KhosraviNik and Mral.