“Be like Sweden” (?): Swedish COVID-19 strategy in mainstream and far-right US media

By means of a longitudinal systematic content analysis across six mainstream US news and six US far-right media outlets, we illustrate in this paper how the Swedish COVID-19 approach was refracted through ideologically diverse media outlets in the US. In doing so, we show how the same events can be interpreted through quite different ideological lenses and misconstrued for political purposes. We show how Sweden was championed as a beacon of limited state interference to criticise the US left and government’s pandemic approach; an interesting reversal of how Sweden is usually seen by the US (far) right. We discuss the implications of these findings.