An emerging body of research generally referred to as visual politics have brought the heavy research focus on linguistic modalities of political communication closer to parity with visual modality emphasis. The study reported here was conducted to test if this schism still has shelf-life or if there was reason to move to a multimodal plane where the raveling of visual and linguistic modalities becomes an ontological departure point for research. We found evidence to support the latter and built a multimodal research instrument that reliably captures character framing (stateliness, compassion, mass appeal, ordinariness, sure loser) across three countries. We directed focus towards commercial online news coverage of Germany, Poland, and the United States that represent different political and media systems in the Global North. The quantitative content analysis sample spans 2,688 online news stories with seven political candidates identified in 6,560 cases across six modalities. We found support for the hypothesis that political and media systems affect how the news media frame the character traits of political candidates in both visual and linguistic modalities. Specifically, the competitive tendencies of majoritarian democracies manifested as candidate-centered, simplistic, and polarizing character framing in US media content compared to journalistic output in multi-party consensus democracies. For example, US news media were more consistent in their portrayal of election winners and losers than German and Polish news media, emphasizing stateliness, compassion, and ordinariness in the winner while assigning the negative sure loser frame to the election loser.
Publication: International Journal of Press Politics
Co-Authors: Dennis Steffan (Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Free University of Berlin) Umberto Famulari (College of Liberal Arts, Colorado State University)