Abstract
This master thesis is about smoking in the Danish society and how it is described. We started off with an interest in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) because it is a disease, which many Danes suffer from. When we started to gather our empirical material and when analysing it we found a new point of interest. We stumbled upon how smoking was described in the media. Smoking and COPD is strongly related, as most COPD cases are a consequence of smoking tobacco. Therefore smoking is mentioned in all our gathered articles regarding COPD. The way smoking was described caught our interest; almost every time smoking is mentioned it is related to something very unhealthy and bad for us. There can be no doubt that smoking tobacco is bad for our health but people are still lightning up a cigarette. Knowing the consequences of smoking tobacco we wonder why people are still doing it. And which effect does the media’s articulations have for the people who smokes tobacco?

In this thesis we look at several articles from the Danish newspapers regarding tobacco smoking. Furthermore, we have made two focus group interviews; one with three who do smoke tobacco and one with three who do not. This will be our empirical material, which will lay the foundation of our analysis. We will be looking at which discourses the media is using to articulate smoking and which discourse our informants are using. We wish to see if these discourse are the same or if there is a difference in the articulations.
To analyse the discourses in the articulations we are working with Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis. We will be using his three-dimensional model for our analyses. When working with Fairclough we will be looking at the language, both spoken and written, but also on the social practises. Fairclough, being a linguist, focuses on language but also recognizes that the language alone is not enough. Therefore he has developed his three-dimensional model. We use Fairclough’s approach both on our articles, which represent the Danish media, and on our informants.

When analysing our empirical material we discovered the discourses used to articulate smoking in the media and among our informants was not the same. The media was being critical regarding smoking tobacco and the discourses they used to describe smoking involved an addiction-discourse, a criminality-discourse, a health-discourse, a disease-discourse among others. When we talked to our informants they used others and more positive discourse to describe smoking. Among the discourse they used we saw a society-discourse, community-discourse, a free-will-discourse etc. In both the articles and among our informants we noticed a focus on the healthy lifestyle. This is a very contemporary trend, which plays an important part in this thesis as well.

We were interested in which effect the media’s articulations of smoking had on our informants. Were they at all affected? When analysing the articles we saw a tendency in the articulations. The negative discourses were stigmatising the smokers. To support this theory we used theory about stigma from social psychology. This theory supported our suspicion and made us able to show when and where in the articles they were stigmatising. To find out which effect this stigmatization could have on our informants we included another theory from the social psychology. This theory is called social identity theory and describes how our identity is partly based on the groups we are part of. When on groups we share identity, being football fans or even being males and females. This theory helped us describe the influence the stigmatization has on our informants.

The conclusion on this master thesis is that the medias articulations regarding smoking tobacco are not the same as we see among our informants. The media are using mostly negative discourses to articulate smoking. Our informants are aware of the negative consequences of smoking but they are relating smoking with something good as well. The negative discourses the media are using to describe smoking has a stigmatising affect on the smokers. This effect can lead to a defiant behaviour among our informants when it comes to smoking tobacco.