摘要：
In this talk I outline the visual approach to analysis of media content and candidate nonverbal behavior during election campaigns. Despite the rise of the Internet, television remains the dominant news medium, owing to its visual nature and nearly universal accessibility. Given the documented centrality of visual images in shaping public opinion, one might expect that communication researchers would pay close attention to the visual component of television when studying political content. But in fact, visuals are an understudied aspect of political coverage, reflecting researcher preferences to examine verbal language over visual portrayals. Prominent bodies of news research, including agenda setting and framing analysis, have virtually ignored the visual component of television reporting. This oversight deserves research attention in light of findings that voters draw on a variety of information sources – visual images as well as verbal content – when forming impressions and arriving at political judgments. The “image bites” approach to news visuals has three aims: to establish the information value of candidate portrayals during the campaign process; to associate visual depictions and shifts in public opinion during the campaign; and, to provide a framework for other investigators interested in pursuing visual analysis of political news.
作者簡介：
Erik P. Bucy (Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park) is an Associate Professor of Telecommunications and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Bucy is the editor of Politics and the Life Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal published twice yearly by Allen Press. He is the author, with Maria Grabe, of Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (Oxford, 2009)—winner of the 2010 Outstanding Book Award from the International Communication Association. He is also the editor, with R. Lance Holbert, of the forthcoming Sourcebook for Political Communication Research: Methods, Measures, and Analytical Techniques (Routledge, 2010). Bucy’s research interests include visual analysis of television news, civic uses of new media, and normative theories of media and democracy.