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

当电视新闻画面把公众放在战斗的前线时，公众会有什么反应？公众对战争的支持随着围绕冲突的事件和结果而起伏不定。一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)以及对输赢的看法。很少有人亲眼目睹战争时期的真实事件。相反，这些事件是通过新闻媒体向大众传达的。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可能也会改变。联合PI收集的新数据显示，电视新闻对战争的报道发生了戏剧性的变化。现代电视上播放的暴力画面在频率和严重性上都令他们的前辈相形见绌。如果战争图像现在是公民接受信息的基本组成部分，那么公众对战争的支持模式必须进行修改，考虑到视觉信息对民意的影响。这个项目将战争报道的变化融入到我们对公众对冲突的支持的理解中。为此，系统地测量了电视新闻中图像的变化。以前的新闻视频编码方案要么过于模糊，要么过于具体，而视频游戏中的暴力行为评级系统被用来捕捉电视上不断变化的战争图像的严酷程度。对范德比尔特电视新闻档案馆的原始内容分析(来自美国广播公司、哥伦比亚广播公司、全国广播公司、福克斯新闻和美国有线电视新闻网在越南战争、波斯湾战争和目前的伊拉克战争期间的全国性晚间新闻节目的主要报道)进行了检验，以经验性地评估电视新闻对战争和战争图像的报道如何随着时间和网络的变化而变化。这些数据提供了有关战争覆盖范围的重要描述性信息。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可能如何影响公众对战争的想法。首先，使用这种内容分析和汇总的盖洛普民意调查数据，发现支持这样一种假设，即当暴力被框定为不正当时，电视新闻报道中的图形图像会减少公众对战争的支持。调查还显示，公众对战争支持率的下降往往与新闻强度的高水平相一致。其次，利用数据收集的实际图像和内容，进行了一项对照实验，使我们能够在个人分析层面上评估暴力战争图像对公众对战争的支持的因果关系和影响。这些结果的更广泛的影响是重大的，因为它促进了我们对战争和舆论的理解，特别是对媒体中视觉图像的影响。这些图像的影响可以而且应该被评估，让政治学家和媒体学者对舆论形成有更细微的了解。

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.