Struggles for Visibility

Abstract

This article addresses the ways in which terrorists are rendered visible in the news media. By studying images used in coverage of terrorists, the article focuses on the visual construction of this figure, which symbolizes the public’s notion of the “enemy”, in terms of specific attacks and the general threat thereof as well as terrorist actors, networks, and ideologies. The article takes its point of departure in the assumption that two visual forms are prevalent for representing terrorists in the news media, “surveillance representations” and “self-representations”. Based on this assumption, the article is guided by a principal research question, namely: How are terrorists made visible in the news media through surveillance representations and self-representations and what are the prevalent genres for visually representing terrorist actors? The article draws on a theoretical framework concerning the news media’s propensity to personalize the terrorist and the mediated visibility of terrorists. Empirically, the article is based on a quantitative content analysis of coverage of terrorism by Danish public service broadcasters DR and TV2 in 2016 to provide an overview of the proportions between surveillance representations and self-representations and develop a typology of the most widespread genres: ID photography, surveillance footage, selfies and similar, and private snapshots.

KEYWORDS:

• terrorism
• visual news coverage
• visibility
• personalization
• quantitative content analysis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Stine Marie Haarløv for research assistance. Moreover, I would like to thank the following colleagues for very helpful feedback on the article: Mikkel Eskjær, the research group Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images, University of Copenhagen (Bolette Blaagaard, Solveig Gade, Jun Liu, Ally McCrow-Young, Nina Grønlykke Mollerup, Christina Neumayer, and Ekatherina Zhukova) and the research group Face of Terror, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Ingvild Folkvord, Anne Gjelsvik, Aud Sissel Hoel, Nadège Lourme, and Mads Outzen). Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for very useful suggestions.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. From the perspective of sociological theory, Bohn and Willems (2001) use the German terms Fremdthematisierung (foreign thematization) and Selbstthematisierung (self thematization) to designate two overall modes for understanding presentations of identity. My concepts of surveillance representations and self-representations bear resemblance to their terminology insofar as they also point to the opposition between being looked upon and characterized/depicted by oneself and by others. However, they also differ because of my emphasis on representation and on “surveillance” rather than “foreign” to underscore the institutional anchoring of this paradigm of visibility.

2. In a previous study, Zhang and Hellmueller (2016) similarly base their analysis of ISIS on a quantitative content analysis of media coverage, but without touching upon the visual aspect.

3. One of Us is the title of Norwegian writer Åsne Seierstad’s ([2003] 2015) non-fiction book about the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Velux Foundation [grant number 13143], Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images.