This study was carried out to examine how we can interpret media messages. My ambition with this work was also to compare and discuss how different media describe one and the same event. Behind this scientific research lies a basic assumption that the media are of considerable, and still growing, import-ance in our society. Media messages offer a special knowledge that help us understand and handle the world. Though a lot of other things also make up and influence our construction of reality I would like to view the media as a power resource that makes the frame for the public meaning system. As such it also tells us about truth and relevance. My work was focussed on examining how two of the largest daily news-papers in Sweden - Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter - chose to describe the events in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995. I got a reasonable amount of messages to study by searching the databases Medie-arkivet and Presstext 950712-950714. My interpretation was sourced in the content and was finetuned to analyse which subject dominated the message, if it could be said to be objective or not and if it was made to conceive concrete facts or a deeper understanding for the phenomena. In my study the scientific analysis was made with a hermeneutical method involving interpreting the meaning of a message through continual reference to its context. In combination with a qualitative approach this was done as a result of looking at communication as essentially human and as such it can best be understood considering the meaning system to which it belongs. In the process of interpreting I also acknowledge the receiver as a powerful source in the construction of meaning. When it comes to the method of interpreting I chose to construct three dimensions to analyse the material considering the presence or non-presence of major characteristics. They were made up in relation to a theory that made me answer the questions for the inquiry. The dimensions were also done in order to make possible a categorisation for better understanding of the result of the study. The way I would like to compare and discuss the result does not need a dimension and consequently no dimension was worked out for this purpose. The result of the study showed that a stratification is to be found in the way how both newspapers differ in choosing their news. Aftonbladet is more an instrument for news with a human bias and as such not always objective. Dagens Nyheter on the other hand is more interested in news with political aspects. I find it quite interesting that the events in Srebrenica are described in a somewhat one-sided way. This is obvious with both newspapers in the way they choose subjects for their messages and the way that they treat their subjects when they encode the messages. Another remarkable aspect of the result has to do with how a lot of the messages are subjective in an implicit way. Maybe it is not surprising that we can discern a change in the media content throughout the three days from which the messages came from. The informa-tion became more solid as the media had more material to work with. This makes it easier for the receiver to construct a deeper meaning when decoding the messages. One can also assume that the receiver now has the possibility to relate his or her inscribed knowledge from the previous days. Along with this knowledge an active search for information can take place. This implies that the special knowledge that media offers must be put into a critical process in order to make the media description of reality reliable.