Framing a Murder : A Comparative Qualitative Content Analysis of News Coverage of Charlie Kirk's Murder in Dagens Nyheter and the Wall Street Journal

This study examines how the 2025 murder of American political figure Charlie Kirk is framed in Swedish and American news media. Based on the assumption that news reporting does not merely reflect events but actively shapes them through linguistic, ideological, and symbolic choices, the study compares how Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) and The Wall Street Journal (USA) define the event. The analysis was conducted through a qualitative comparative content analysis based on Entman’s (1993) four framing functions: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendations, also supplemented by a fifth category capturing ideological representations. The dataset consists of twelve articles published between 10 September and 24 September 2025 and the coding scheme was developed deductively from framing theory and refined inductively during analysis, thereby making the study abductive. The findings reveal subtle differences between the two media systems. Dagens Nyheter predominantly frames the murder as a concrete criminal act which emphasizes verified information, law enforcement sources, and a restrained, institutionally oriented news logic. Political interpretations appear mainly through quoted actors rather than through editorial commentary. In contrast, The Wall Street Journal situates the murder within a broader pattern of political violence and national polarization. The newspaper provides more explicit interpretive commentary, positioning the event as part of an escalating societal conflict and a weakening of civic norms. These findings contribute to research on political communication by illustrating how national media logics shape public interpretations of politically motivated violence. A potential direction for future research is proposed: to examine how a similar murder is framed in Swedish and American media when the event takes place in a third country.