Visual coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War

Framing conflict in three US news magazines

Bibliographic Data

ID12904456
AuthorsCarol B Schwalbe (University of Arizona, corresponding author), Shannon M Dougherty
Year2015
Volume8
Issue1
Pages141-162
Publication date2015-02-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMedia War & Conflict (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1750-6352 • E-ISSN: 1750-6360
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1750635215571204
OpenAlexW2324141719
LanguageEN
Citations received30
References cited58

The 2006 Lebanon War presented a rare opportunity to explore how the three major US news magazines visually covered a distant conflict in which the US was not directly involved. Time, Newsweek , and U.S. News & World Report faced the challenge of how to fairly report a conflict that was dominated by one side – Israel. A quantitative content analysis revealed that the military conflict and human interest frames dominated visual coverage of the seven-week war. By emphasizing the war’s negative impact on Lebanon and its people, the news magazines provided a largely American audience with a proportional visual representation of the conflict. Only 11 percent of the images showed the injured and dead, which is consistent with other war studies. This article discusses how the news magazines visually framed the war, why images of Hezbollah and protests were rarely seen, and why many casualty images included women and children

Art · Content analysis · Framing (construction · Media studies · News media · Photojournalism · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Visual arts · Global Security and Public Health · History · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Middle East Politics and Society

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