Visual framing of the 2022 Andalusian elections: Comparative analysis in the regional and national press
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/Ambitos.2024.i64.04Keywords:
Political communication, electoral campaigns, Andalucía, visual framing, pressAbstract
The dominance of image in communication has become a central aspect in electoral campaigns. In the tradition of studies on the effects of media on campaigns, researchers had adopted, framing theory as one of the explanatory paradigms. These works focused their analysis on the textual elements of the information. However, the prevalence of the image in communication has opened up a growing interest in “visual framing”, which incorporates the study of images and their meanings. This work contributes to deep into this theory and its application to the regional press. The objective of this study is to compare the visual, frames used by the national and regional press in an electoral contest, the 2022 Andalusian elections. Through a content analysis, and in accordance with the coding of visual frames of political candidates used by Grabe and Bucy (2009) -ideal candidate, populist campaigner, and sure loser-, the article analyze the type of campaign portrayed by the media. It examines the photographs of the candidates published during the election campaign (June 3-17, 2022) by four Spanish newspapers: the two national newspapers with the largest number of readers (El País and El Mundo) and the two most read Andalusian regional newspapers (Ideal de Andalucía and Sur). Results confirm the relevance of the visual frames, but there are no significant differences between regional and national press, and the most relevant frame is in both cases the ideal candidate.
The objective of this study is to compare the visual frames used by the national and regional press in an electoral contest, the 2022 Andalusian elections. Through a content analysis, and in accordance with the coding of visual frames of political candidates used by Grabe and Bucy (2009) -ideal candidate, populist campaigner, and sure loser-, the article analyze the type of campaign portrayed by the media. It examines the photographs of the candidates published during the election campaign (June 3-17, 2022) by four Spanish newspapers: the two national newspapers with the largest number of readers (El País and El Mundo) and the two most read Andalusian regional newspapers (Ideal de Andalucía and Sur).
The results of the analysis validate the importance of visual frames, the differences between the national and regional press, and the types of candidates that images profile
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