ABSTRACT
This chapter makes the case for the importance of analyzing audiovisual messages in political communication research and presents a content analysis methodology for reliable assessment of visual content in televised coverage of presidential elections. Despite repeated calls for increased consideration of televised images, the visual aspect of broadcast, cable, and now online news remains under-researched. As we have noted elsewhere (see Bucy & Grabe, 2007; Grabe & Bucy, 2009), this is due in part to a normative, social-scientific bias against image-based media and a tendency to dismiss television as a superficial or entertainment medium that lacks the seriousness of print. “The belief that audiovisuals are poor carriers of important political information has become so ingrained in conventional wisdom that it has throttled research,” Graber (2001, p. 93) has observed. Although various coding schemes have been proposed over the years for evaluating the content of news visuals, including Graber’s (1996, 2001) “gestalt coding” procedure and detailed categories for camera presentation techniques (see Kepplinger, 1991), none have caught on in a significant way.
