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

当电视新闻画面将公众置于战斗的前线时，公众会作何反应？公众对战争的支持随着围绕冲突的事件和结果而起伏。个人支持战争的内部计算包括精英共识的数量，战争的成本（例如战场死亡）以及对胜利和失败的看法。很少有人能亲眼目睹战争时期的真实事件。相反，这些事件通过新闻媒体传达给大众。如果电视新闻对战争的报道发生变化，电视新闻消费者对战争的看法也可能发生变化。联合PI收集的新数据显示，电视新闻对战争的报道发生了巨大变化。现代电视上的暴力画面无论在频率还是严重程度上都让他们的前辈相形见绌。如果战争图像现在是公民接收信息的基本组成部分，那么公众支持战争的模型必须以考虑视觉信息对公众舆论的影响的方式进行修改。本项目将战争报道的变化融入我们对公众支持冲突的理解中。为此，本文对电视新闻图像的变化进行了系统的测量。以前的新闻视觉编码方案要么太模糊，要么太具体，视频游戏中的暴力评级系统被用来捕捉电视上战争图像不断变化的严酷程度。本文通过对范德比尔特电视新闻档案（ABC、CBS、NBC、Fox News和CNN在越南战争、海湾战争和当前伊拉克战争期间的全国晚间新闻节目的主要报道）的原始内容分析，对战争和战争图像的电视新闻报道如何随时间和网络而变化进行了分析。这些数据提供了关于战争报道的重要描述性信息。但更重要的是，他们提供了一个机会来测试这些不同的信息如何影响公众对战争的思考。首先，使用这种内容分析和汇总盖洛普民意调查数据，支持的假设，即图形图像在电视新闻报道减少公众对战争的支持时，暴力被诬陷为不合理的是found.It还表明，减少公众对战争的支持往往与高水平的新闻强度。第二，利用实际的图像和内容的数据收集，一个控制实验，将使我们能够评估的cavernity影响暴力战争图像对公众支持战争在个人层面的分析进行。这些结果的广泛影响是重要的，因为它促进了我们对战争和公众舆论的理解，特别是媒体中视觉图像的影响。这些图像的影响可以而且应该得到评估，让政治学家和媒体学者对公众舆论的形成有更细致的了解。

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 empiricallyevaluate 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 causaleffects 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 ourunderstanding 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.