New article: The visibility of disaster deaths in news images: A comparison of newspapers from 15 countries

The new issue of the International Communication Gazette includes a paper I wrote about the newspaper coverage of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake. Building on my work on news representations of death, the article develops a five-step typology of death images, and compares the coverage among 15 countries, from the Americas, Oceania and Europe. Here is the abstract of the paper. The extent to which newspapers display graphic images of death has rarely been studied in relation to the degree of the visibility of bodies, nor do many comparative analyses exist. This has led to a narrow understanding of how and why audiences are exposed to human suffering around the world. In examining newspaper images of the dead from the 2010 Haiti earthquake across 15 countries, this study develops a graphic image content scale to measure such visualizations. It finds significant differences in graphic images across the studied sample, both in terms of the amount of images and the degree of visibility of death. The study argues that major sociocultural influences, such as different religious traditions and societal levels of violence are part of the reason for the differences. Paper can be found here: http://gaz.sagepub.com/content/74/7/655.full.pdf+html Monday 15 October 2012