Representing otherness in youth crime discourse: youth robberies and racism in the Swedish Press 1998-2002.

The aim of this article is to analyze racist news discourse by applying some notions from Norman Fairclough's and Teun van Dijk's work. We know that racism is shaped and defined in relation to specific historic and cultural contexts. How, then, should we grasp the many similarities between different case studies? This issue is addressed by relating the results of the case study mentioned above to the ones arrived at by Hall et al. in their classic Policing the crisis (1978). The conclusion is that these similarities have to do with the recurring externalization of internal conflicts in capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]