Remembering Our Shared Past: Visually Framing the Iraq War on U.S. News Websites

Abstract

This exploratory study analyzes how United States news websites visually portray ongoing (contemporaneous) events and examines their potential role in shaping collective memory by commemorating past (resurrected) events through anniversary retrospectives. A content analysis of 526 images on the home pages of 26 mainstream news sites indicates that during the first five weeks of the Iraq War, the visual emphasis shifted from the official U.S. war machine to the more personal face of those touched by war, both Americans and Iraqis, as photojournalists traveled with the troops to Baghdad. The five main frames that emerged reinforced the patriotic, government-friendly war narrative: conflict, conquest, rescue, victory, and control. By the first, second, and third anniversaries of the war, the visual coverage of hostilities had dropped dramatically. This article discusses some of the reasons why online news sites did not feature many anniversary commemorations of the Iraq War.

Authorship and Information Sourcing for Health News on Local TV Web Sites: An Exploratory Analysis

“…Data were also collected from the same Web sites approximately 1 month later (Thursday, October 18, 2007) in an effort not to bias the results due to a significant health-related event in a given month (e.g., Cervical Cancer Awareness Month is in January, September is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month). Riffe, Lacy, and Fico (1998) have discussed the difficulty of sampling Internet content, and sampling stratification in previous content analyses of online news varies by author (Bucy, 2004;Hoffman, 2006;Lim, 2006;Schwalbe, 2006). Although the most recent research regarding sampling of online news found that two constructed weeks of content are needed to accurately represent online news (Hester & Dougall, 2007), this method is recommended when examining online news as a whole, instead of one particular type of news story, such as "science" or "health."…”

Näkymätön ilmasto, näkyviä kuvia:Ilmastoriskin visualisointi ja kuvallinen kehystäminen Helsingin Sanomissa

“…Korostamisen kannalta huomio kiinnittyy erityisesti lehtijutun erottuvimpiin osiin, kuten otsikkoon, ingressiin, tekstin alkuun, kuvatekstiin ja pääkuvaan (Tankard 2001, 100). Kuvien osalta kuvan kohteen valinta, toimitukseen lähetettävien ja julkaistavien (sekä pois jätettävien) kuvien valinta, kuvan koon määrittely ja asemointi lehteen sekä monet kuvaajan tekemät tuotannolliset ratkaisut vaikuttavat siihen, mitkä aspektit kustakin teemasta korostuvat (Coleman 2010;Messaris & Abraham 2001;Schwalbe 2006) ja millaisia käsitteellisiä kytköksiä mediaesitykseen rakentuu (Scheufele & Tewksbury 2007). Varsinkin suurikokoiset kuvat kiinnittävät nopeasti lehden lukijan huomion (Garcia & Stark 1991;Knobloch ym.…”

“The Police and the Populace”: Canadian Media’s Visual Framing of the 2010 G20 Toronto Summit

“…In an investigation of visual frames of the first, second, and third anniversaries of the Iraqi invasion as a "past (resurrected) event," Schwalbe (2006) found that these visual frames emphasize "the human face of war" rather than the war machine itself.…”

“…Thus, content analysis of visual data is quite common in visual framing studies that "inductively" or "deductively" identify the visual frames in photographs (e.g., Fahmy, 2004Fahmy, , 2007Messaris & Abraham, 2001;Schwalbe, Silcock, & Keith, 2008). For instance, Schwalbe (2006) preferred to inductively glean visual frames from the actual photographs of the Iraqi war, rather than analyze the visual frames depicted in the data deductively. Similarly, Parry's (2010) analysis of british press photography used a similar "inductive" approach and then had independent coders code the data for content analysis.…”