Agonised, localised and politicised? - The visual representation of the Russo-Ukrainian War in online news

The media coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War varies widely between different political and media ecosystems (Hanley, Kumar & Durumeric, 2023). When communicating conflict online, images as visual representations of war are frequently used to create narratives (Perlmutter, 1998; Fahmy & Kim, 2008; Powell et al., 2015). Understanding the similarities and differences of visually embedded narratives across countries is particularly important in the case of the most mediatized conflict to date (Fernández-Castrillo & Ramos, 2023). Given that explicit portrayal is not possible (or at least severely limited by the editorial guidelines of most news websites), visual metonymies offer a useful tool to reveal the substitutions through which news portals represent the conflict, such as using an image of destruction to portray war-related actions. Therefore, a metonymy-based image analysis is conducted on the featured images of 480 news articles to detect different patterns in the news coverage of the United States of America and the European Union. Although a recent study revealed that European and US citizens share a range of views on major global issues, such as the preferred outcome of the war (Ash, Krastev & Leonard, 2023), citizens’ support for the level of intervention shows a changing trend. A 2023 Gallup study found that almost half of Americans believes that their country is doing and spending too much to help Ukraine (Younis, 2023). Considering the impact of public discourse on war-related measures and policy-making, it is hypothesized that to gain the public’s support, US news coverage illustrates the war with images that generate reader engagement (e.g., via the DESTRUCTION FOR WAR metonymy) to a greater extent than EU media. Thus, the research contributes to the complex media representation of the Russo-Ukrainian War by observing the agonised, localised and politicised nature of news images and their implications for public perception. References: Ash, T. G., Krastev, Iv & Leonard, M. (2023). United West, divided from the rest: Global public opinion one year into Russia’s war on Ukraine. European Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved from https://ecfr.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/United-West-divided-from-the-rest_Leonard-Garton-Ash-Krastev.pdf Fahmy, S., & Kim, D. (2008). Picturing the Iraq War: Constructing the image of war in the British and US press. International Communication Gazette, 70(6), 443-462. Fernández-Castrillo, C., & Ramos, C. (2023). Post-Photojournalism: Post-Truth Challenges and Threats for Visual Reporting in the Russo-Ukrainian War Coverage. Digital Journalism, 1-24. Hanley, H. W., Kumar, D., & Durumeric, Z. (2023). " A Special Operation": A Quantitative Approach to Dissecting and Comparing Different Media Ecosystems’ Coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 17, pp. 339-350). Perlmutter, D. (1998) Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Framing Icons of Outrage in International Crisis. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Powell, T. E., Boomgaarden, H. G., De Swert, K., & de Vreese, C. H. (2015). A clearer picture: The contribution of visuals and text to framing effects. Journal of communication, 65(6), 997-1017. Younis, M. (2023, November 2). American Views on the Ukraine War in 6 Charts. Gallup. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/513680/american-views-ukraine-war-charts.aspx