The experiment investigates visual framing effects of news stories on readers'(1) emotional response, (2) evaluation of communicative quality, (3) journalistic credibility and (4) objectivity, and (5) perception of actor representation. Three versions of a news report about the Gaza conflict were used. While the text remained the same, different images were added representing visual human-interest framing, visual political framing, and no visual framing. Visual human-interest framing elicited stronger emotional responses, higher values concerning the communicative quality, and had an impact on the perceived actor representation. No differences in objectivity and credibility were found among the three stimuli.

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Visual elements are central components of current political communication. Visual portrayals, for example, convey cues and attributes that can affect the perceived credibility, truthfulness, and suitability of politicians. The pervasive use of images in politics has made visual political communication an important research area. Yet, analyses in the field predominantly use content analyses to examine the valence of visual portrayals. The present study investigates how the audience actually interprets visual cues and composition elements in the images of politicians and compares the results with the findings of content analyses. A card-sorting technique (Q-sort) and qualitative interviews are employed to capture subjective and intuitive interpretations of 33 color photographs of a politician. When compared with the attribute measurements of previous content analyses, the results show a strong accordance in the audience interpretation and the attribute analysis regarding an unfavorable political depiction. However, the findings indicate disagreement about the composition of a favorable depiction.

Hashtag feminism has become a popular tactic of online protest against gender inequality. Using the Twitter hashtag #distractinglysexy, women scientists posted pictures of themselves in labs or during field research to contest misogynist remarks by Nobel laureate Tim Hunt. We examined the resulting humorous and memetic discourse on Twitter as well as its coverage in news media combining a content analysis of the multimodal tweets with a qualitative discourse analysis of German and British news media. The results show that the ironic memes in which researchers addressed sexism in academia by parodying social norms and ideals of ‘sexiness’ yielded substantial media attention, but with differences in the two countries: While the hashtag #distractinglysexy initiated a broader debate on sexism and discrimination in academia in the UK news media discourse, in the German context, this form of ‘self-mediation’ was portrayed either as ‘something funny on the Web’ or as a harmful firestorm.

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