Problem statement and purpose of the study: The picture and the visual presentation have an increased importance in news media today. Which means that politicians visual frames can have a great impact on the readers and therefore on the outcome of an election. The purpose of this study is to examine the visual framing of the american presidential candidates of the 2016 election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, to see if there is any sign of stereotyping or personalising, and if the candidate’s gender matters. Women and men have been framed differently by the news media in the past. Men has often been portrayed as the normative politician, while women been portrayed as the female politician. Method: This essay is written by a qualitative method and is the result of semiotic analysis of 16 pictures from the swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. Eight of the analyzed pictures show Donald Trump and the other eight show Hillary Clinton. We analyzed the pictures by denotation and connotation. Main result: Our results showed some significant differences in the visual framing of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Trump is portrayed as an more threatening and serious manner while Hillary Clinton’s framing shows a more emotional and encouraging politician. We also found stereotyping in the visual framing, but not so much personalising. The two candidates gender was for the most part clear in the framing. Hillary Clinton’s frames were those of a woman and Donald Trump’s those of a man. There were differences in the two newspapers visual framing, but they were not as clear as the ones between Trump and Clinton.

This research looks at how local television news framed the efforts in Iowa in 2010 and 2012 to unseat Iowa Supreme Court Justices whose 2009 ruling in the case Varnum v. Brien made Iowa the third state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. By looking at relevant news packages and interviewing journalists, news directors, and spokespersons, I traced the way the traditionally ignored judicial retention votes became a top political story, and how particular frames entered the news. I found that despite a well-meaning intention to cover the story in a professionally acceptable fashion, these same news values and reporting rituals blinded journalists to how their attempts to provide “balance” ultimately accomplished the opposite. Evidence studied here suggested that morality politics was the dominant frame throughout most of the coverage, with the civil rights aspects of the issue mostly relegated to the day after each election rather than in the weeks prior. Political science literature defines morality politics as a campaign strategy that relies upon arguments based on “morality,” “values,” or even “sin” to motivate supporters. In the Iowa case, this concept gets modified because while the conservative campaign engaged the logics of morality politics, they also felt the need to couch their campaign in issues like “judicial activism.” I conclude the ability to get news coverage of the anti-retention campaign and get this modified morality politics framing as dominant in that coverage reveals the exercise of political and social power in defense of the hegemonic heteronormative cultural matrix.

This thesis critically analyses the language and images used by international online news media to represent the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in May 2021. In total, 270 online news headlines and featured lead images, published on the English news websites of Al Jazeera, BBC and CNN, are analyzed. This study aims to identify the framing employed by the different international media outlets as well as analyze the scope of their coverage. The theories of agenda-setting, framing and media representation help guide the current research to identify the discursive practices employed by international news media. The framework employed to carry out this research combines Pan & Kosicki (1993) approach to textual framing analysis with Barthes’ (1972) method for analysing visual semiotics. The results indicate variations in the patterns of representing and framing the conflict across the three analysed media outlets. However, overall, the results reveal that the 2021 outbreak in the Israel-Palestine conflict is portrayed mainly through a frame of ‘’war’’. These distinctions broadly reflect and correspond to the journalists' practices and differences of each media outlet.

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The thesis deals with the issue of photographs taken during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The ethnically motivated conflict, in which the Hutu majority tried to exterminate the Tutsi minority, claimed almost a million victims in a hundred days. The Rwandan genocide is notoriously associated with machetes and radio. Most of the victims were killed with primitive weapons, and the murders of neighbours and family members took place under the influence of a propaganda radio broadcast. The thesis describes how photojournalism in the 1990s reported on such a specific conflict as modern genocide. The thesis uses visual framing analysis, which is based on the theory of framing. After that it was possible to identify the recurring visual frames through which the Rwandan genocide is depicted in the images.

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In both Mexico and the U.S., abortion rights protests have been taking place in recent years, but while Mexico is moving forward with the legalization of abortion, the U.S. is going in the opposite direction with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Through framing, journalists select salient information, shaping audiences' understandings of social movements. The protest paradigm suggests that due to journalistic norms and routines, journalists tend to focus on disruptive acts, which can stigmatize the protest. Additionally, scholars have stated that men and women photojournalists have different approaches to covering certain topics. This cross-national research combined a content analysis of photographs in U.S. and Mexican media with in-depth interviews with photojournalists to determine if photojournalists in each country are reproducing the protest paradigm and if there are gendered differences in how they photograph abortion rights protests. The results revealed that women and men photograph differently, with women capturing more intimate photos; however, photojournalists' gendered experiences are also influenced by how protesters perceive them. Furthermore, the study suggests that photojournalists from both countries are questioning objectivity and are attempting to move away from the protest paradigm. This research provides valuable insights into visual framing theory, protest news coverage, and gendered norms in photojournalism.

Social media and their accompanying smartphone apps have opened brands to consumers in unprecedented ways. Of these sites, none, with the exception of Facebook, are more popular than Instagram, a social networking app that is image-centric and image-driven. As a free platform for potentially reaching, attracting, and engaging with millions of consumers, Instagram offers brands an unprecedented avenue for free advertising—all on a relatively level playing field. This means that brands, even startups, have the same access to potential followers as larger, more established brands. This advertising is more fluid, more frequent, and more inconspicuous than traditional advertisements; e.g., magazine spreads, billboards, or commercials. To better understand what elements are commonly found in startups image posts on Instagram, as well as to learn if or how those elements translated to engagement, this study employed a content analysis to deconstruct 438 image posts aggregated from the Instagram accounts of ten U.S. startups. Images were coded for salient image features, viral advertising appeals, fundamental image functions, and creative message segments as outlined by Taylor's seminal advertising model, the six-segment message strategy wheel (1999). Likes and comments were recorded during coding in order to measure engagement. Two approaches to analyzing the data were then taken. First, descriptive statistical analyses were applied to the data to determine how frequently elements appeared among startups' image posts. The second approach involved two phases. In Phase 1, crosstabs were conducted to discover what interrelationships exist among these elements. In Phase 2, a qualitative content analysis of the data compiled from the initial content analysis was conducted to determine if certain schema were commonly manifest among posts with high and low engagement in respects to likes and comments. The subsequent findings indicated that object(s) were the most common image feature, informing was the most common function, ration was the most common image function, and humor was the most popular viral advertising appeal, although as a whole, viral advertising appeals were rarely manifest. The qualitative content analyses suggested that more schema negatively affected engagement than schema that positively affected it, though several important themes and base combinations were perceptible among the top 10 percent of posts in relation to engagement.

This master thesis aims to understand whether the connection of visuals and emotions on social media can be utilized by activists to increase awareness of environmental issues. In particular, this thesis discussed if emotional visual content about environmental activism on social media increases recipients' emotional awareness and small-scale activism when embedded in visual framing communication. The work is based on theories like affective visual framing, affective intensity, stickiness and grab, which define the dynamics of emotions online and the merits that come with it, when used for strategic communication. In combination with visual communication on social media and the emotional impact of visuals, environmental imagery develops power for social transformation. Analyzing the organization Greenpeace and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation for their emotional strategic communication on Instagram, the research uses mixed-methods to gather data about the reception of emotional visuals. A questionnaire collects data about broad responses to images and seven in-depth interviews focus on deeper motivations and opinions behind the emotional reaction. The research reveals that first of all emotions are generated by emotionally framed visual contents. These emotions also lead to an emotional awareness of environmental issues. Nevertheless, small-scale activism was neither increased by emotional content nor by general emotional awareness. Solely short-term interest in activism could be identified.

Diploma thesis Visual framing of terrorist attacks over the years focuses on how the selected terrorist attacks are presented in four Czech daily newspapers. The theoretical part of the thesis is focused on visual framing - which is based on the theoretical grounds of the concept of framing - and the visual presentation of terrorist attacks in the media. The aim of the research is to compare the visual framing of the attack in London in July 2005 and in Paris in 2015 using a quantitative content analysis of photographs accompanying the news coverage of attacks. The emphasis was on general frames of photographs accompanying the news coverage of both attacks and the difference between the framing of both events, the extent of the violence displayed, the differences in the visual framing of quality and tabloid press with a focus on photographs of victims and injured, and the relation of the title and the caption with the visual frames of analyzed visuals. Other research papers and studies of visual framing of terrorist attacks and related topics are also presented.