Blindern Upper Secondary School

Alva Lohne Pahle came in first place in 2026 with her research project “From News to Narrative: How the Media Shape Our Understanding of Terrorism.”

The project examines Norwegian media coverage of two different terrorist attacks in the country in recent years.

The study focuses on the media reporting of the terrorist attacks carried out by Zaniar Matapour and Philip Manshaus in 2022 and 2019, respectively. Through her research, the student identifies patterns in the media’s editorial choices and framing in their coverage of these events and the perpetrators. She argues that the media, in this way, do not merely convey news, but actively shape our perception of reality.

The jury’s statement:

In the project “From News to Narrative: How the Media Shapes Our Understanding of Terror,” Alva Lohne Pahle investigates how the media shapes our understanding of terrorism and its perpetrators. The study is delimited to media coverage of the terrorist attacks carried out by Philip Manshaus in 2019 and Zaniar Matapour in 2022, in Bærum and Oslo. The rationale for the research question is that the media does not merely convey news but also shapes reality through its choices and perspectives. This is a precise justification that highlights the importance of examining media coverage and of being a critical reader.

The study is based on six newspaper articles, and the researcher addresses her research question through a combination of quantitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis.

The discussion is thorough and well grounded in both examples and theory. The researcher succeeds in both describing and explaining the relevance of the theoretical frameworks in a strong manner. The choice of critical discourse analysis as a method is ambitious and compelling, and when combined with quantitative content analysis, the methodology is well suited to investigating the topic at hand. The research is transparent, and the researcher has made sound methodological choices, as well as providing a strong justification for the selection of texts.

The researcher finds that Philip Manshaus’s actions are interpreted through an individualizing discourse—as deviance, that is, a psychological explanation—whereas Zaniar Matapour’s actions are framed as terrorism in an external sense, as organized and ideologically rooted in Islamist networks. In the first case, the response calls for improved mental health services; in the second, for increased policing.

The patterns identified by the researcher reflect how the media in Norway constructs narratives about “us” and “the others.” This aligns with existing literature on the media in Norway. At the same time, the researcher maintains a critical perspective and demonstrates a high degree of independence in her research work.

The jury thanks Pahle for her important and valuable research!