Doctoral Dissertation Research: Prime Time Politics: Television News and the Visual Framing of War

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

How does the public react when television news images put them on the frontlines of battle? The public's support for war ebbs and flows in response to events and outcomes surrounding the conflict. An individual's internal calculations to support war include the amount of elite consensus, the costs of the war (e.g. battlefield deaths), and perceptions of winning and losing. Few individuals witness actual war time events. Instead, these events are conveyed to the mass public through news media. If television news coverage of war changes, the way television news consumers think about war may change as well. New data, collected by the co-PI, shows that television news coverage of war has changed dramatically. Modern televised images of violence dwarf their predecessors, both in frequency and severity. If war imagery is now a fundamental component of information received by citizens, models of public support for war must be revised in a way that consider the impact of visual information on public opinion. This project integrates the change in the coverage of war into our understanding of the public's support for conflict. To do so, changes in the images in the televsion news are systematically measured. Where previous coding schemes of news visuals have been either too vague or too specific, a rating system of violence in video games is employed to capture the changing harshness of war imagery on television. Original content analysis of the Vanderbilt Television News Archives (lead stories from the national evening news programs from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and CNN during the Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War and current war in Iraq) are examined to empirically evaluate how television news coverage of war and war images varies over time and across networks. These data offer important descriptive information about the coverage of war. But more importantly, they offer the chance to test how this differing information may affect the public's thinking about war. First, using this content analysis and aggregate Gallup polling data, support for the hypothesis that graphic imagery in television news coverage decreases public support for war when the violence is framed as unjustified is found. It is also shown that decreases in public support for war tend to coincide with high levels of news intensity. Second, utilizing actual images and content from the data collection, a controlled experiment that will allow us assess the causal effects of violent war images on public support for war at the individual level of analysis is conducted. The broader impact of the results are significant, since it advances our understanding of war and public opinion, in particular, and the impact of visual images in the media, in general. The impact of these images can and should be evaluated, giving political scientists and media scholars a more nuanced knowledge of public opinion formation.