Picturing the Iraq War: Constructing the Image of War in British & US Press (original) (raw)
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War's Visual Discourse: A Content Analysis of Iraq War Imagery
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This study reports the findings of a systematic visual content analysis of 356 randomly sampled images published about the Iraq War in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report from 2003-2009. Compared to a 1995 Gulf War study, published images in all three newsmagazines continued to be U.S.-centric, with the highest content frequencies reflected in the categories U.S. troops on combat patrol, Iraqi civilians, and U.S. political leaders respectively. These content categories do not resemble the results of the Gulf War study in which armaments garnered the largest share of the images. This study concludes that embedding photojournalists, in addition to media economics, governance, and the media-organizational culture, restricted an accurate representation of the Iraq War and its consequences. Embedding allowed more access to both troops and civilians than the journalistic pool system of the Gulf War; however, the perceived opportunity by journalists to more thoroughly cover the war through the policy of embedding was not realized to the extent they had hoped for. The embed protocols acted more as an indirect form of censorship.
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This study reports the findings of a visual content analysis of 1305 Iraq War-related photographs appearing in the US press, represented by The New York Times, and the British press, represented by The Guardian . Overall, the two newspapers visually portrayed the Iraq War differently. Further, the more spontaneous or direct coverage of actually ongoing events were rare at best, and were exclusively found in photographs that ran in The Guardian. One aspect of the pictorial coverage, however, seems unprecedented: the emphasis on the human cost of the war focusing on Iraqi civilians. Moreover, images of loss of military life were scarce but still available.
Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2012
This article examines the visual coverage of civilian casualty incidents in the first month of the Iraq invasion in 2003, drawing on a detailed and comprehensive content and framing analysis of Iraq war photographs printed in seven British national newspapers. The study found that around 7 per cent of all Iraq-related news photographs dealt with the issue of civilian casualties (including journalists and non-Iraqis), across tabloid and 'quality' press titles. However, the prominence, treatment and functions of civilian casualty photographs varied greatly among particular newspapers, and not always in a predictable manner considering the papers' editorial positions on the conflict. The article details the study's findings on the varying occurrence of casualty-related photographs, and analyses the ways in which such events were pictorially and verbally framed; whether by graphically representing the human cost of the war or, alternatively, by 'disappearing the dead' through visual and rhetorical means.
Visually Framing the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq in TIME, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report
International Journal of Communication, 2013
Previous studies of U.S. war coverage have identified a narrow range of visual portrayals that reflect American-centric, government source-directed frames. This study found that the three major U.S. news magazines echoed those patterns during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A content analysis of 2,258 images revealed that TIME, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report framed the first 16 months of the Iraq War from an American-centered perspective, focusing on conflict, politicians, and human interest. The news weeklies generally neglected alternative viewpoints, such as antiwar protests, destruction, Iraqi military leaders and troops, and the human toll. Nor did readers see many Iraqi and American females, children, the injured, or the dead, as they appeared in less than 12% of the images.
Photographic images of war have been used to accentuate and lend authority to war reporting since the early 20th century, with depictions in 1930s picture magazines of the Spanish Civil War prompting unprecedented expectations for frontline visual coverage. By the 1960s, Vietnam War coverage came to be associated with personal, independent and uncensored reporting and image making, seen as a journalistic ideal by some, and an obstacle to successful government conduct of the war by others. This article considers the idealized ‘myth’ of Vietnam War coverage and how it has influenced print and television photojournalism of American conflicts, skewing expectations of wartime media performance and fostering a consistent pattern of US Government/media collaboration. Upon analysis, pictorial coverage of US wars by the American media not only fails to live up to the myth of Vietnam but tends to be compliant and nationalist. It fails to reflect popular ideals of independent and critical photojournalism, or even the willingness to depict the realities of war.
DICHOTOMY BETWEEN WAR AND VISUALIZATION OF WAR: AN ANALYSIS OF THE WAR PHOTOS AWARDED BY THE WPP
Moment Journal, 2019
Wars, having negative effects on local, national and global scales, violate the fundamental rights of living beings and, in general, cause irreversible casualties. War is a phenomenon that affects life itself and the entire social structure and institutions. Although death, physical injury, or psychological consequences are well known to war, their macro-level damage to the social structure is often overlooked. The mass media also tend to focus on the obvious consequences of the war while ignoring its structural impact on society. This research applies content analysis to the images of the war theme awarded in various categories by the World Press Photo Organization, towards inquiring to what extent possible impacts and consequences of wars are represented via such images. The study concludes that usually Western photojournalists create war narrative while the geography of conflict depicted is mostly non-Western. It also concluded that the war was visualized by themes such as death, injury and disability, displacement, hunger, and deprivation, that the moments of war are highlighted while its long-term implications are ignored; that war is portrayed without subjects by symbolic images, often indirect; and that war is viewed as a hierarchical field in terms of the perpetrator and the victim. Key Terms: photojournalism, World Press Photo, visualisation of war, Western gaze, war photography
Picturing America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ in Afghanistan and Iraq: Photographic Motifs as News Frames.
Following research on depictions of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, this article discusses the nature of US news- magazine photo coverage of the ‘War on Terrorism’ in Afghanistan and the military invasion of Iraq. The analysis suggests that news-magazine photographs primarily serve established narrative themes within official discourse: that published photographs most often offer prompts for prevailing government versions of events and rarely contribute independent, new or unique visual information. Despite claims of ‘live’ and spontaneous coverage, photographs from Afghanistan and Iraq, like those from the Gulf War in 1991, are characterized by a narrow range of predictable, recurrent motifs. Repetitive images of the mustering and deployment of the American military arsenal overshadow any fuller or more complex range of depiction. And when dominant news narratives, such as the fall of the Taliban or the fall of Baghdad, came to a close, photographic coverage of continuing events in Afghanistan and Iraq fell off sharply.
2014
Although the 2003 Iraq invasion was not wholly framed as a ‘humanitarian intervention’, the rhetoric of bringing liberation, democratization and human rights to the Iraqi people was widely advanced by the coalition and supporters as a legitimating reason for war. This article assesses the role played by press photography in legitimizing or challenging this crucial framing during the invasion across a range of UK national newspapers. Privileging visual content in research design, the study presents selected results from a comprehensive content and framing analysis of press photography during the invasion period (March–April 2003), specifically examining the prominence and treatment of photographs in the humanitarian-related visual coverage, along with the accompanying words used to define, support or detract from the events depicted. While finding that the rationale of humanitarianism generally played well for the coalition during this study period, this article explores the problema...
Comparing war images across platforms: Methodological challenges for content analysis.
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Although many news consumers see war images on multiple media platforms, scholars generally have studied those visuals a single medium at a time. This article discusses the challenges of conducting a quantitative content analysis of war images across print, broadcast and online media in a single research project. It details some of the obstacles the authors faced in their examination of visuals of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and offers suggestions for researchers studying images across multiple platforms.