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Article Excerpt
One of the most vivid ways journalism reports war to the world is through images: photographs, video, graphics, icons, and maps. These reports and the news frames they help build are important because they can affect not only how audiences react to the news of war but also what noncombatants know of war. Even scholars who reject visual determinism--the idea that "images often drive public opinion"--concede that "such visual influence has the potential to occur" (Domke, Perlmutter, & Spratt, 2002, p. 136). That suggests there is value in studying how war images are presented in the news media. As Sontag (2003) wrote, "Television news producers and newspaper and magazine photo editors make decisions every day which firm up the wavering consensus about the boundaries of public knowledge" (p. 61).
Those boundaries have been particularly important in the most recent U.S.-led war--the invasion of Iraq that began March 19, 2003. Well into the war, American public opinion remained sharply divided over whether the invasion was justified (Balz & Morin, 2005; Kull, Ramsay, Subias, Weber, & Lewis, 2004). Images became a key part of the debate as scholars, citizens, and journalists considered the meaning and effect of such iconic visuals as photographs of a statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Baghdad's Firdos Square on April 9, 2003 (Fahmy, 2007; Hatley Major & Perlmutter, 2005; Rampton & Stauber, 2003; "Staged," 2004), and photographs that surfaced in 2004 of Iraqis undergoing humiliating punishment at the hands of U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison (Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2006; Hersh, 2004a, 2004b; "Image Problem," 2004). In fact, visuals were so important to the Pentagon that during the early days of the Iraq War, its Joint Combat Camera Program processed 600 to 800 photos and 25 to 50 video clips daily from about 150 military photographers (Hiebert, 2003).
In addition, the visual coverage of the Iraq War differs in two important ways from depictions of earlier U.S. military conflicts. First, Iraq marks the emergence of the Internet as a global mass-media platform delivering war news and images 24/7 (Outing, 2003; Rainie, Fox, & Fallows, 2003). Second, this is the first U.S. ground war where visual journalists with high-resolution digital photo and video equipment were embedded with the troops and dispatched real-time images from the battlefield (Hiebert, 2003; Lasica, 2003)--an arrangement that has been shown to affect the framing of both broadcast packages (Aday, Livingston, & Hebert, 2005; Pfau et al., 2005) and print textual reporting (Morin, 2006; Pfau et al., 2004).
The objective of this study was to assess visual framing of the early weeks of the Iraq War in mainstream U.S. media. To achieve this goal, the authors conducted a content analysis of 1,822 war-related images collected from television, newspaper, news magazine, and Internet news outlets at five 1-week intervals, beginning the night of the first attacks and ending when U.S.-led coalition forces appeared to control Baghdad. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no scholars have studied the framing of a single event at multiple points on multiple platforms. This work is important because it adds to the growing body of comparative media research published in this journal (e.g., Cho et al., 2003; Dutta-Bergman, 2004; Eveland & Dunwoody, 2002; Walma van der Molen & Klijn, 2004).
Literature Review
A Patriotic Tone
Although scholarly analysis of coverage of the Iraq War was still developing in 2008 as the U.S. occupation entered its sixth year, research has revealed that the U.S. news media tended to buttress the government's viewpoint during the invasion, as they did early in other conflicts. Fried (2005), for example, found that terrorism and Americans' fears about it provided the context for prewar coverage in Time and Newsweek. Other researchers noted that television news was more likely to depict the war's attributes positively than negatively (Kang, 2005) and that the Associated Press and U.S. newspapers tended to associate antiwar demonstrators with conflict and prowar demonstrators with harmony (Luther & Miller, 2005). Several studies found U.S. coverage was more likely than foreign reporting to rely on official sources (Dimitrova, Kaid, Williams, & Trammell, 2005; Dimitrova & Stromback, 2005; Fahmy, 2007; Lee, 2004). The U.S. media, Dutta-Bergman (2005) concluded, served as "public relations agents of the U.S. government" to demonize the enemy and thus justify the invasion (p. 220).
A patriotic tone was present in visual as well as textual coverage. Griffin (2004), for example, observed that images in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report "reinforced a purely American-centered perspective" (p. 397). Later, Aday, Cluverius, and Livingston (2005) drew on a particular incident--the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue on April 9, 2003--to show how that might happen. They concluded that repeated airing of broadcast footage of the toppling by CNN and the FOX News Channel prematurely suggested a U.S. victory, overshadowed stories about heavy fighting elsewhere, and led to a sharp drop in battle coverage over the next week. According to Hatley Major and Perlmutter (2005), "the media embraced the statue as a supercharged moment of symbolism" that represented the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime (p. 43).
Images and the Conflict Frame
Some scholars have argued that adoption of the government perspective in early U.S. media coverage was the result of media reliance on framing that emphasized conflict rather that the individual costs of war. Framing, of course, "is a question of slant, structure, emphasis, selection, word choice and context" (Cappella & Jamieson, 1997, p. 57) and how the news media "bundle key concepts, stock phrases, and iconic images to reinforce certain common ways of interpreting developments" (Norris, Kern, & Just, 2003, pp. 10-11). Journalists employ frames, Entman (1993) noted, whenever they "select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient ... in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described" (pp. 51-58). As a result, Gitlin (1980) argued, media frames are the way in which "symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual" (p. 1).
Visual discourse about war can reflect a conflict frame--which de Vreese and Semetko (2000) defined as emphasizing "conflict between individuals, groups, institutions, or countries" (p. 95)--when it focuses on the official machinery of war to the neglect of alternative concepts. That is the focus Griffin (2004) found in images in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report just before and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The news magazines focused their visual coverage on military hardware, troops, and civilian and military leaders--repeating themes they had used during the 1991 Gulf War (Griffin & Lee, 1995; Moriarty, 1995). Although the April 2003 issues showed multiple images of the combatants fighting, which were rare in 1991, overall "the same types of pictures were relatively absent: pictures of casualties, whether Iraqi, British or American; pictures of damage done to Iraqi homes and the Iraqi infrastructure by the bombings; pictures from the Iraqi point of view" (Griffin, 2004, p. 397).
Opportunities for Frame Transformation
Frames are not necessarily static, however (Snow & Benford, 1988; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986). Instead, they can transform, unfolding over time through the emergence of narrative structures that Bennett (1975) called "scenarios." Some research on the Iraq War suggests that embedding of journalists offered a chance for emergence over time of scenarios that would build a human interest frame, which "brings a human face, an individual's story, or an emotional angle to the presentation of an event, issue, or problem" (de Vreese & Semetko, 2000, p. 95). Research and anecdotal reports suggest that the unprecedented coverage by embedded journalists puts greater focus on individuals on television and in print (Haigh et al., 2006;...
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