Chapter published in:
Crisis and the Media: Narratives of crisis across cultural settings and media genres
Edited by Marianna Patrona
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 76] 2018
► pp. 151–176

Chapter 7
The visual construction of political crises

A news values approach

This chapter examines the visual construction of social actors (elite and non-elite) in all the news stories about political crises published by the British broadsheet The Independent between 2008 and 2014. Our findings show that the practices involved in the construction of political crises are overwhelmingly linked to oral communication. Yet the kind of oral communication through which political crises are visually rendered varies significantly according to the (non)elite status of the groups being visually framed. Whereas elite groups are visually constructed as dealing with political crises through measured, rational talk, non-elite groups are visually represented as either handling political crises in aggressive ways or as being their hopeless recipients. Our findings also support the thesis that the concept of crisis has undergone a process of ‘semantic inflation’ in postmodernity.
Keywords: political crisis, news images, news values, visual representation, news images, photojournalism, discourse analysis, political communication, news discourse
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Of political crises and news images
  • The study
  • Political crises in the news: Visually framing elite and non-elite social ators
  • Political leaders in times of crisis
  • Citizens in times of crisis
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.76.08lor
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