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Abstract
War coverage in the media, its impact on people's perceptions of wars, and its influence on political actors have increasingly been analysed in political communication research. In recent times, there has been a special focus on television war coverage. In this study, the coverage of the Vietnam War in LIFE magazine, the most famous photo magazine of the 1960s and 1970s, is analysed. An iconographic analysis of all the covers devoted to the war in Vietnam (1960/65–1975) helps to identify different periods of the visual construction of the reality of the Vietnam War. Ambivalences and a polysemic variety of competing interpretations which are probably typical for any war coverage become obvious. Those results support the assumption that the growing rejection of the Vietnam operation by US citizens was not the effect of a supposedly homogenous, let alone unambiguous, presentation by the media, but rather of recipients transforming the construction of the social reality of the Vietnam War.
Notes on contributor
Matthias Bandtel, M.A. obtained his Magister degree in political science, media and communication studies, and philosophy from the University of Mannheim. Since 2010, he has been a research associate and lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. He works on the fields of political sociology, the sociology of illness and the body, and action and interaction theory. Especially, his research focuses on political communication research, political culture research, and studies on media representations of political actors’ ‘sick role’. His publications comprise papers on Pathology and modernity (forthcoming), Authenticity in political actors’ presentation of self (2012) and Educational promotion of political participation (with Ulrich Weiss, 2012).
Correspondence to: Matthias Bandtel, University of Wuppertal, Faculty of Educational and Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, Gaußstr. 20D-42119 Wuppertal, Germany. Email: [email protected]
Dr. Jens Tenscher is senior scientist at the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Alpen-Adria-University of Klagenfurt. He co-chairs the Political Communications Section of the German Political Science Association. His research agenda covers various aspects of (comparative) political communications research, studies on political leadership, parliamentarianism, electoral campaigning and voting behaviour as well as political culture research.
Correspondence to: Jens Tenscher, Austrian Academy of Sciences/Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies, Postgasse 7, A-1010 Wien, Austria. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 Concerning this matter, the ‘CNN effect’ has been one of the most popular communications approaches to reach public interest (Gilboa, Citation2005; Livingston & Eachus, Citation1995; Robinson, Citation2002).
2 Seen mathematically, the Vietnam War made up no more than 3 minutes per day of each US network's television programming between 1965 and 1970 (Paul, Citation2005: 843).
3 See Berger and Luckmann (Citation2010) for a general introduction to the concept of a socially constructed reality.
4 The concept of media frames now plays a crucial role in communication studies. For an overview of the historical development of frame analysis see Gamson et al. (Citation1992). We use the term here according to Bennett (Citation1975) in its more dynamic understanding as narratives to emphasize the transformation of definitions and interpretations over time.
5 LIFE magazine constituted American photojournalism. Until 1972 it very successfully ran with weekly photo reportage. At the beginning of the 1970s, shrinking advertisement sales and rising costs forced the publishers to dismiss staff and shorten runs. In December 1972 the magazine ceased production. Only a few special reports were published infrequently between 1972 and 1978 (Tebbel & Zuckerman, Citation1991: 235). In 1978 LIFE started a re-launch, focusing on general interest themes, and published monthly until 2000. During the Second Gulf War in 1991, it again ran as a weekly magazine called ‘LIFE in Time of War’. Financial problems forced the magazine to close in March 2000. In 2004, publishers started a revival: until April 2007, LIFE was published as an insert in the weekend prints of some major newspapers. As a consequence of a cooperation between Time Inc. and Google in 2008, approximately 10 million pictures from LIFE magazine (http://images.google.com/hosted/LIFE) and all issues from 1936 to 1972 (http://books.google.com/) were made freely available to the public. Simultaneously, LIFE started a re-launch as an online magazine (http://www.LIFE.com).
6 Iconology is sometimes referred to synonymously as ‘iconography’ in secondary literature (see for example Rose, Citation2012: 202–09). We prefer the term ‘iconology’ as Panofsky (Citation1955, Citation1972) himself coined the approach that way. In addition, he calls the third and ‘highest’ level of interpretation, where the intrinsic meaning of an image is uncovered, ‘iconological’ (Panofsky, Citation1955: 26–54).
7 As one methodological approach to visual data in the paradigm of discourse analysis, iconology has been rediscovered by many disciplines such as political communication studies (Knieper, Citation2005; Knieper & Müller, Citation2005; Müller, Citation2003) and sociology of knowledge (Knoblauch et al., Citation2009; Raab, Citation2008; Raab & Tänzler, Citation2006) in recent times.
8 Due to the temporary suspension of LIFE magazine, no issues were published between 1973 and 1978.
10 It is sometimes misleadingly stated that the American press concealed or even disclaimed military operations until 1964 (Dominikowski, Citation2004: 71). However, the empirical evidence makes this claim unsupportable.
14 In the following years, visualizations of US victims were often portrayed in shades of grey (e.g. LIFE, 27 October 1967), while casualties and mortalities of the opposite side were usually shown in colour (e.g. LIFE, 26 November 1965). In doing so, an attitude of dismay regarding one's own casualties was demonstrated, and drastic presentations of victims of one's own side were avoided.
17 In summer 1967, the aircraft-carrier USS Forrestal was positioned in the Gulf of Tonkin at the South Chinese Sea right at the North Vietnamese shores. On 29 July 1967, 134 crew members died in a fire on the flight deck caused by a malfunction of one of the aircraft's missiles stationed on the ship. This was the most grievous accident on a US warship up to that time (Jenkins, Citation2002). See http://books.google.de/books?id=3lUEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
18 In 1967, 11,153 US service members died or were declared dead in Vietnam (NARA, Citation2008). Even higher body counts were registered in the two subsequent years.
24 The symbiosis between mass media on the one hand and war on the other is not only reflected in a higher demand for press products during times of war (Wilke, Citation1995: 24–25). In the case of LIFE magazine, it is underlined by an instructive coincidence. The issue, in which the necrology to the memory of the magazine's late editor Henry Luce was published (LIFE, 10 March 1967), of course dealt with the Vietnam War on its front cover.
25 For an in-depth analysis of the role of an active audience see Fiske's (Citation1989) studies in the tradition of the British Cultural Studies.
26 In some European legislations, academic fair dealing provisions have already been included in copyright laws. In Great Britain, for example, the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act explicitly declares that ‘[f]air dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work for the purposes of research for a non-commercial purpose does not infringe any copyright in the work’ (Parliament of the United Kingdom, Citation1988, pt 2, s 29). The German Urheberrechtsgesetz (‘copyright act’) includes the so called ‘Zitatrecht’ (‘the right to quote’) which allows ‘the reproduction, distribution, and public presentation of published works for the purpose of citation […] especially when certain works after their publication are used in academic works for exemplification’ (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Citation1965, §51, s 1; trans. MB/JT).
27 For an analysis of war coverage in the digital age see Matheson and Allan (Citation2009).