M A Bock
Biographic Data
| ID | 40290 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M A Bock |
| GIVEN NAMES | M A |
| FAMILY NAME | Bock |
| SIGNATURE | BOCK M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3022-9706 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 94 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Power of Visual Framing in the Age of AI
This invited forum explores the complexity and power of visual framing in the field of journalism and mass communication. The forum brings together leading visual communication scholars who offer insights into how images continue to shape meaning and audience interpretations in an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven social media landscape. Contributions discuss framing as a constructive act of power, the interpretive agency of audiences, the inte…
Burning bridges as career imperative? Accountability, journalistic identity and police sources
The relationship between journalists and their sources is significant for the way it may, or may not, serve the information needs of the news audience. Changes in the media environment, such as citizen journalism and video documentation of police abuse have created challenges for accountability journalists who cover law enforcement. This project uses long-form interviews with such journalists to examine their relationships with law enforcement so…
The Voice of Visual Evidence: Performance Theory, the MacGyver Factor, and Photojournalistic Authority
Historically, journalism’s claims to authority for photojournalistic work have largely rested on the camera’s technical perfection. Digital media, including AI, have disrupted this authority, as it is now possible not just to alter a photographic image but to construct one with merely a prompt. This article argues that the crisis of photographic truth requires a paradigmatic shift and suggests that performance theory offers conceptual remedy. Per…
The Solar Pencil
[Photography has become a household word and a household want; it is used alike by art and science, by love, business, and justice; is found in the most sumptuous saloon and in the dingiest attic
Anonymous dissent: Protest, privacy, and photographic surveillance in digital media
Protesters in recent years have been making a somewhat novel demand: they are asking journalists to blur their faces in news coverage of public demonstrations. This article investigates this demand to explore how new surveillance technologies and the political economy of media are complicating the ethics of visual journalism. Reviewing 26 articles from news outlets, trade publications, and blogs published between May 2020 and October 2024 that di…
Watching a Show versus Being There: Embodied Gatekeeping and Visual Perspective in Congress
Questioning Sports Journalists: Stereotypes, Work Routines, and Color-Blind Racism in Sports Press Conferences
Sports scholars have long studied how stereotypes pervade sports. However, little if any of this research has examined the origins of these stereotypes and how they influence journalistic practice. This study explores sports journalists’ work routines, their perception of stereotypes in sports, and whether there is a connection between the two. The authors conduct a critical discourse analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 sports journalists fro…
Visual media literacy and ethics: Images as affordances in the digital public sphere
This article argues for the adoption of an affordance model for media literacy. Media literacy efforts have largely evolved separately from visual literacy programs, neglecting the role of the photographic image in the digital public sphere. The hyper-visuality of media today demands closer attention to visuals in media literacy efforts because individuals cognitively process images differently. Images are more emotionally powerful and memorable …
Designing the Visual Gateways into Crime News: A Comparison of Youtube Thumbnails from Journalists and Non-Journalists
Thumbnails and link previews play an outsized role in determining which online content is shared, seen, and engaged with. But conventions for these vary depending on the platform and the content creator. Journalists and non-journalists alike use and sometimes design these thumbnails with often striking differences. On some news aggregators, like Apple News or Google News, the bulk of the thumbnails are photographs related in some way to the linke…
Narrative authority in online video: Legacy media and digital native production styles
This project examines the way journalists establish narrative authority in online video news through their strategic uses of epistemological production elements. Journalists have historically constructed video news stories with a combination of linguistic and photographic epistemic components to assert their role as authoritative arbiters of factual reality. Online news makes extensive use of video, but production formats and their associated epi…
Narrative transparency and credibility: First–person process statements in video news
Journalism critics have argued that transparency about the reporting process is an ethical imperative. Convergence offers news organizations opportunities for changed writing styles that may foster more transparency, especially as they embrace video storytelling. This project used two experiments to investigate the impact of transparent language on the way online news consumers perceive the credibility of video news reports. The study operational…
The blame game: How video evidence changes narratives of misogynistic violence in sports discourse
Violence against women is prevalent both in and outside the sports world, and dozens of professional athletes have been accused, although the reactions and consequences to such accusations are not always the same. This study examines three instances of athletes committing misogynistic violence and the effect that video evidence has on sports media discourse. We look at a wide range of online media sources and print newspaper articles (n = 153) to…
The Robert Capa Myth: Hegemonic Masculinity in Photojournalism’s Professional Indoctrination
This project examines the mythos of famed war photographer Robert Capa and its influence on the photojournalistic canon. Using Barthes’ concept of ideological myth as a foundation, the project examines four sets of discourses about Capa: his own self-promotion, biographies, exhibition reviews, and photojournalistic textbooks. The analysis suggests that the Capa myth is characterized by hegemonic masculinity, emphasizing risk-taking, strength and …
Introduction to the Special Issue: Visual Representation and Marginality
Eight minutes, 46 seconds: a short clip that reverberates months later as I write these words. The recording of George Floyd gasping for breath under police officer Derek Chauvin's knee and his fin
Theorising visual framing: Contingency, materiality and ideology
Visual framing is a popular paradigm for media research around the world but its conceptualisation remains vague and often neglects the richness of images. Just as with framing theory generally, its definition and operationalisation are matters of considerable debate. Visual framing’s many applications may be advantageous for their bridging properties but at the same time demand theoretical refinement. Based on a review of 165 scholarly publicati…
Looking Up, Talking Back: Voice and Visibility as a Digital Human Right
This essay draws from capabilities theory to argue that visual literacy, which combines technical skills, knowledge, and ethics, is an essential human capability in the digital age. It builds on the idea of democratic voice to posit that individuals need to control the way they are seen and to visually account for their lives in order to achieve a balanced system of “veillance.” Human beings are surveilled at unprecedented rates in the digital ag…
The faces of local TV news in America: Youth, whiteness, and gender disparities in station publicity photos
TV news is a visual medium that requires its on-air journalists to look good, but a history of lawsuits and survey research suggests that this burden is spread unevenly. Critics charge that women are expected to look younger and sexier, and minority broadcasters are held to a White standard of beauty. This project investigated the reality behind those complaints by examining the faces of on-air journalists working for local stations in the US acc…
The voice of lived experience: Mobile video narratives in the courtroom
Video is overtaking other modes of communication in new media. Whether from a smartphone, a wearable device or surveillance camera, video is being made, stored and shared in unprecedented ways. Once the exclusive territory of institutions becomes large enough to finance video production and its storytelling power, technology’s contemporary democratization is changing the landscape of visual narrative. This project explores the discursive nature o…
Covering nipples: News discourse and the framing of breastfeeding
Health experts are in widespread agreement that breastfeeding is generally the best option for infants and their mothers. The right to breastfeed in public has been guaranteed in forty-seven states in the US as a means to support nursing mothers and their babies, yet breastfeeding in public remains a controversial act. This project represents a textual analysis of news articles in the top ten newspapers in the United States to study the way breas…
Faith and reason: An analysis of the homologies of Black and Blue Lives Facebook pages
Highly publicized deaths of Black men during police encounters have inspired a renewed civil rights movement originating with a Twitter hashtag, “Black Lives Matter.” Supporters of the law enforcement community quickly countered with an intervention of their own, using the slogan, “Blue Lives Matter.” This project compared the discourses of their respective Facebook groups using cultural discourse analysis that considered words, images, and their…
Mastering the Mug Shot: Visual journalism and embodied gatekeeping
This project uses a case study of an elected official’s booking mug shot to examine the way political actors engage in embodied performance to maintain their image in visual media. Mug shots are images that are ostensibly equalizing and represent a long-standing link between law enforcement, journalism and visual culture. Released through the “gates” of law enforcement, they are imbued with a connotation of guilt even though they are created prio…
Film the Police! Cop-Watching and Its Embodied Narratives: Film the Police
Police accountability organizations known as “cop-watching” groups are proliferating thanks to smartphone penetration and the ease of video sharing on social networks. These groups use digital media technologies to challenge official accounts of events and encroach on the borders of traditional journalism. This qualitative project collected material over the course of 2 years, and uses participant observation and long-form interviews to explore t…
Showing versus telling: Comparing online video from newspaper and television websites
Video has become a central part of news on the web. As an emerging form of news, news videos are appearing with varied narrative structures, styles and formats. Narrative structure is one way that journalists establish discursive authority. Because of contrasting traditions regarding visual news, newspaper videos might be expected to employ different narrative strategies. This content analysis compared the narrative structure of videos posted by …
Facing the Death Penalty While Facing the Cameras: A case study of television journalism work routines
This case study of a capital murder trial explores the way television journalism work routines shape trial coverage. Based on field observations, textual analysis and open-ended interviews, it examines how television news routines are translated into the stories that are broadcast and posted to the Web. The interviews and fieldwork made it possible to connect the way gatekeeping and the source–journalist relationship affect the framing of the sto…
Newspaper journalism and video: Motion, sound, and new narratives
Video has become a key component for multi-media newspaper websites. Working with video is often a new skill for print-based journalists, who previously may have considered it the province of television news organizations. Institutional convention has held up television news as a foil to still images and the printed word, a dualism that has fostered hierarchal thinking about video and its normative role in journalism. Such hierarchal thinking, or…
Film the Police! Cop-Watching and Its Embodied Narratives: Film the Police
Police accountability organizations known as “cop-watching” groups are proliferating thanks to smartphone penetration and the ease of video sharing on social networks. These groups use digital media technologies to challenge official accounts of events and encroach on the borders of traditional journalism. This qualitative project collected material over the course of 2 years, and uses participant observation and long-form interviews to explore t…
Citizen video journalists and authority in narrative: Reviving the role of the witness
New media technologies allow for unprecedented participation in the public sphere, with financial investments on a par with other mainstream hobbies. Citizen video journalists (VJs) are acquiring the technical, and in some cases, narrative skills needed to participate in online discourse. Yet citizen VJs lack the institutional authority enjoyed by professional journalists. This project compares the narrative strategies employed by professional an…
Newspaper journalism and video: Motion, sound, and new narratives
Video has become a key component for multi-media newspaper websites. Working with video is often a new skill for print-based journalists, who previously may have considered it the province of television news organizations. Institutional convention has held up television news as a foil to still images and the printed word, a dualism that has fostered hierarchal thinking about video and its normative role in journalism. Such hierarchal thinking, or…
Showing versus telling: Comparing online video from newspaper and television websites
Video has become a central part of news on the web. As an emerging form of news, news videos are appearing with varied narrative structures, styles and formats. Narrative structure is one way that journalists establish discursive authority. Because of contrasting traditions regarding visual news, newspaper videos might be expected to employ different narrative strategies. This content analysis compared the narrative structure of videos posted by …
Narrative inequality in the TRC hearings: On the hearability of hidden transcripts
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission victim hearings were a highly unusual discourse event in which previously silenced and powerless people were offered a prestigious public forum and speech format to tell about their experiences of human rights violations. However, despite the equal access offered to victims for the telling of their stories, pre-existing inequalities persisted and were reflected in the relative ‘hearability’ of th…
Faith and reason: An analysis of the homologies of Black and Blue Lives Facebook pages
Highly publicized deaths of Black men during police encounters have inspired a renewed civil rights movement originating with a Twitter hashtag, “Black Lives Matter.” Supporters of the law enforcement community quickly countered with an intervention of their own, using the slogan, “Blue Lives Matter.” This project compared the discourses of their respective Facebook groups using cultural discourse analysis that considered words, images, and their…
Mastering the Mug Shot: Visual journalism and embodied gatekeeping
This project uses a case study of an elected official’s booking mug shot to examine the way political actors engage in embodied performance to maintain their image in visual media. Mug shots are images that are ostensibly equalizing and represent a long-standing link between law enforcement, journalism and visual culture. Released through the “gates” of law enforcement, they are imbued with a connotation of guilt even though they are created prio…
Designing the Visual Gateways into Crime News: A Comparison of Youtube Thumbnails from Journalists and Non-Journalists
Thumbnails and link previews play an outsized role in determining which online content is shared, seen, and engaged with. But conventions for these vary depending on the platform and the content creator. Journalists and non-journalists alike use and sometimes design these thumbnails with often striking differences. On some news aggregators, like Apple News or Google News, the bulk of the thumbnails are photographs related in some way to the linke…
The faces of local TV news in America: Youth, whiteness, and gender disparities in station publicity photos
TV news is a visual medium that requires its on-air journalists to look good, but a history of lawsuits and survey research suggests that this burden is spread unevenly. Critics charge that women are expected to look younger and sexier, and minority broadcasters are held to a White standard of beauty. This project investigated the reality behind those complaints by examining the faces of on-air journalists working for local stations in the US acc…
Narrative authority in online video: Legacy media and digital native production styles
This project examines the way journalists establish narrative authority in online video news through their strategic uses of epistemological production elements. Journalists have historically constructed video news stories with a combination of linguistic and photographic epistemic components to assert their role as authoritative arbiters of factual reality. Online news makes extensive use of video, but production formats and their associated epi…
Looking Up, Talking Back: Voice and Visibility as a Digital Human Right
This essay draws from capabilities theory to argue that visual literacy, which combines technical skills, knowledge, and ethics, is an essential human capability in the digital age. It builds on the idea of democratic voice to posit that individuals need to control the way they are seen and to visually account for their lives in order to achieve a balanced system of “veillance.” Human beings are surveilled at unprecedented rates in the digital ag…
Narrative inequality in the TRC hearings: On the hearability of hidden transcripts
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission victim hearings were a highly unusual discourse event in which previously silenced and powerless people were offered a prestigious public forum and speech format to tell about their experiences of human rights violations. However, despite the equal access offered to victims for the telling of their stories, pre-existing inequalities persisted and were reflected in the relative ‘hearability’ of th…
Newspaper journalism and video: Motion, sound, and new narratives
Video has become a key component for multi-media newspaper websites. Working with video is often a new skill for print-based journalists, who previously may have considered it the province of television news organizations. Institutional convention has held up television news as a foil to still images and the printed word, a dualism that has fostered hierarchal thinking about video and its normative role in journalism. Such hierarchal thinking, or…
Citizen video journalists and authority in narrative: Reviving the role of the witness
New media technologies allow for unprecedented participation in the public sphere, with financial investments on a par with other mainstream hobbies. Citizen video journalists (VJs) are acquiring the technical, and in some cases, narrative skills needed to participate in online discourse. Yet citizen VJs lack the institutional authority enjoyed by professional journalists. This project compares the narrative strategies employed by professional an…
Facing the Death Penalty While Facing the Cameras: A case study of television journalism work routines
This case study of a capital murder trial explores the way television journalism work routines shape trial coverage. Based on field observations, textual analysis and open-ended interviews, it examines how television news routines are translated into the stories that are broadcast and posted to the Web. The interviews and fieldwork made it possible to connect the way gatekeeping and the source–journalist relationship affect the framing of the sto…
Showing versus telling: Comparing online video from newspaper and television websites
Video has become a central part of news on the web. As an emerging form of news, news videos are appearing with varied narrative structures, styles and formats. Narrative structure is one way that journalists establish discursive authority. Because of contrasting traditions regarding visual news, newspaper videos might be expected to employ different narrative strategies. This content analysis compared the narrative structure of videos posted by …
Mastering the Mug Shot: Visual journalism and embodied gatekeeping
This project uses a case study of an elected official’s booking mug shot to examine the way political actors engage in embodied performance to maintain their image in visual media. Mug shots are images that are ostensibly equalizing and represent a long-standing link between law enforcement, journalism and visual culture. Released through the “gates” of law enforcement, they are imbued with a connotation of guilt even though they are created prio…
Film the Police! Cop-Watching and Its Embodied Narratives: Film the Police
Police accountability organizations known as “cop-watching” groups are proliferating thanks to smartphone penetration and the ease of video sharing on social networks. These groups use digital media technologies to challenge official accounts of events and encroach on the borders of traditional journalism. This qualitative project collected material over the course of 2 years, and uses participant observation and long-form interviews to explore t…
The voice of lived experience: Mobile video narratives in the courtroom
Video is overtaking other modes of communication in new media. Whether from a smartphone, a wearable device or surveillance camera, video is being made, stored and shared in unprecedented ways. Once the exclusive territory of institutions becomes large enough to finance video production and its storytelling power, technology’s contemporary democratization is changing the landscape of visual narrative. This project explores the discursive nature o…
Covering nipples: News discourse and the framing of breastfeeding
Health experts are in widespread agreement that breastfeeding is generally the best option for infants and their mothers. The right to breastfeed in public has been guaranteed in forty-seven states in the US as a means to support nursing mothers and their babies, yet breastfeeding in public remains a controversial act. This project represents a textual analysis of news articles in the top ten newspapers in the United States to study the way breas…
Faith and reason: An analysis of the homologies of Black and Blue Lives Facebook pages
Highly publicized deaths of Black men during police encounters have inspired a renewed civil rights movement originating with a Twitter hashtag, “Black Lives Matter.” Supporters of the law enforcement community quickly countered with an intervention of their own, using the slogan, “Blue Lives Matter.” This project compared the discourses of their respective Facebook groups using cultural discourse analysis that considered words, images, and their…
The faces of local TV news in America: Youth, whiteness, and gender disparities in station publicity photos
TV news is a visual medium that requires its on-air journalists to look good, but a history of lawsuits and survey research suggests that this burden is spread unevenly. Critics charge that women are expected to look younger and sexier, and minority broadcasters are held to a White standard of beauty. This project investigated the reality behind those complaints by examining the faces of on-air journalists working for local stations in the US acc…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Visual Representation and Marginality
Eight minutes, 46 seconds: a short clip that reverberates months later as I write these words. The recording of George Floyd gasping for breath under police officer Derek Chauvin's knee and his fin
Theorising visual framing: Contingency, materiality and ideology
Visual framing is a popular paradigm for media research around the world but its conceptualisation remains vague and often neglects the richness of images. Just as with framing theory generally, its definition and operationalisation are matters of considerable debate. Visual framing’s many applications may be advantageous for their bridging properties but at the same time demand theoretical refinement. Based on a review of 165 scholarly publicati…
Looking Up, Talking Back: Voice and Visibility as a Digital Human Right
This essay draws from capabilities theory to argue that visual literacy, which combines technical skills, knowledge, and ethics, is an essential human capability in the digital age. It builds on the idea of democratic voice to posit that individuals need to control the way they are seen and to visually account for their lives in order to achieve a balanced system of “veillance.” Human beings are surveilled at unprecedented rates in the digital ag…
The Robert Capa Myth: Hegemonic Masculinity in Photojournalism’s Professional Indoctrination
This project examines the mythos of famed war photographer Robert Capa and its influence on the photojournalistic canon. Using Barthes’ concept of ideological myth as a foundation, the project examines four sets of discourses about Capa: his own self-promotion, biographies, exhibition reviews, and photojournalistic textbooks. The analysis suggests that the Capa myth is characterized by hegemonic masculinity, emphasizing risk-taking, strength and …
Narrative transparency and credibility: First–person process statements in video news
Journalism critics have argued that transparency about the reporting process is an ethical imperative. Convergence offers news organizations opportunities for changed writing styles that may foster more transparency, especially as they embrace video storytelling. This project used two experiments to investigate the impact of transparent language on the way online news consumers perceive the credibility of video news reports. The study operational…
The blame game: How video evidence changes narratives of misogynistic violence in sports discourse
Violence against women is prevalent both in and outside the sports world, and dozens of professional athletes have been accused, although the reactions and consequences to such accusations are not always the same. This study examines three instances of athletes committing misogynistic violence and the effect that video evidence has on sports media discourse. We look at a wide range of online media sources and print newspaper articles (n = 153) to…
Visual media literacy and ethics: Images as affordances in the digital public sphere
This article argues for the adoption of an affordance model for media literacy. Media literacy efforts have largely evolved separately from visual literacy programs, neglecting the role of the photographic image in the digital public sphere. The hyper-visuality of media today demands closer attention to visuals in media literacy efforts because individuals cognitively process images differently. Images are more emotionally powerful and memorable …
Designing the Visual Gateways into Crime News: A Comparison of Youtube Thumbnails from Journalists and Non-Journalists
Thumbnails and link previews play an outsized role in determining which online content is shared, seen, and engaged with. But conventions for these vary depending on the platform and the content creator. Journalists and non-journalists alike use and sometimes design these thumbnails with often striking differences. On some news aggregators, like Apple News or Google News, the bulk of the thumbnails are photographs related in some way to the linke…
Narrative authority in online video: Legacy media and digital native production styles
This project examines the way journalists establish narrative authority in online video news through their strategic uses of epistemological production elements. Journalists have historically constructed video news stories with a combination of linguistic and photographic epistemic components to assert their role as authoritative arbiters of factual reality. Online news makes extensive use of video, but production formats and their associated epi…
Questioning Sports Journalists: Stereotypes, Work Routines, and Color-Blind Racism in Sports Press Conferences
Sports scholars have long studied how stereotypes pervade sports. However, little if any of this research has examined the origins of these stereotypes and how they influence journalistic practice. This study explores sports journalists’ work routines, their perception of stereotypes in sports, and whether there is a connection between the two. The authors conduct a critical discourse analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 sports journalists fro…
The Voice of Visual Evidence: Performance Theory, the MacGyver Factor, and Photojournalistic Authority
Historically, journalism’s claims to authority for photojournalistic work have largely rested on the camera’s technical perfection. Digital media, including AI, have disrupted this authority, as it is now possible not just to alter a photographic image but to construct one with merely a prompt. This article argues that the crisis of photographic truth requires a paradigmatic shift and suggests that performance theory offers conceptual remedy. Per…
The Solar Pencil
[Photography has become a household word and a household want; it is used alike by art and science, by love, business, and justice; is found in the most sumptuous saloon and in the dingiest attic
Anonymous dissent: Protest, privacy, and photographic surveillance in digital media
Protesters in recent years have been making a somewhat novel demand: they are asking journalists to blur their faces in news coverage of public demonstrations. This article investigates this demand to explore how new surveillance technologies and the political economy of media are complicating the ethics of visual journalism. Reviewing 26 articles from news outlets, trade publications, and blogs published between May 2020 and October 2024 that di…
Watching a Show versus Being There: Embodied Gatekeeping and Visual Perspective in Congress
Sociology (22 works) · Media studies (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Media Studies and Communication (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Art (12 works) · Narrative (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works)