The Syrian conflict has defied both the ways of reporting war and its influence on the public. Only a few empirical inquiries have attempted to evaluate public reactions to representations of war. This article employs an empirically-based study that combines quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate how Swiss audiences react to crisis reporting and visual news framing in French-speaking Swiss media. This article presents an initiatory comprehension of how people respond to images in the media, particularly with respect to military and political contexts, and also constructs a visual map of how audiences process information included in news images of war.