ABSTRACT

Every day we are bombarded with millions of still and moving images, which we usually view in a variety of media: on legacy print and broadcast platforms and with digital devices ranging from traditional desktop computers to laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Many of these visuals depict the horror and tragedy of war or the politically motivated violence often labeled “terrorism.” Because the photojournalist’s lens or, increasingly, the soldier’s snapshots provide most viewers’ only experience with conflict, the news frames encoded in these images have great potential to shape how audiences understand conflict. Unfortunately, analyzing those frames as viewers likely see them, across multiple media platforms, presents several challenges. This chapter discusses how we approached those challenges in studying visual framing of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 in newspapers, television news, and online news sites for a series of articles published between 2004 and 2013 that were the first to compare framing of a single event across the three media. This chapter—which expands on themes outlined in a 2010 essay in the journal Media, War, & Conflict—begins by explaining how a former television news director, a former print and online magazine journalist, and a former newspaper reporter and editor came up with a research project that looked at visuals across those media. It then explains how we decided when to collect data and how to save it, determined how to choose representative samples, and developed comparable units of analysis, drawing on a literature that was limited to studies of videos of war on television or still photographs in newspapers, news magazines, and online. Finally, the chapter discusses the choices that researchers might make for similar projects well into the second decade of the 21st century—examining ways to conduct more nuanced visual analysis, the advisability of developing a standard set of frames for future studies of war visuals, and methods for integrating into multiple-media research the mobile media that more and more people are using to access news and information.