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The Taliban in a pedal boat: A visual framing analysis of Associated Press and Reuters news photographs of the fundamentalist regime after the end of the Afghanistan war
Gironès Martín, Cristina ; Lábová, Sandra (advisor) ; Turková, Kateřina (referee)
The early photographic coverage of the Afghanistan war in 2001 was part of the 'War on terror' discourse, arising from the 9/11 attacks. The information environment was shaped by the US administration's control (Cherkaoui, 2017), and frames were used to depict the enemy, the Taliban, in a way that justified the military intervention (Miller, 2004). Twenty years later, in 2021, US forces decided to leave the country definitively; thus, the war is considered over. This study compares the visual representation of the fundamentalists in Associated Press and Reuters news photographs in 2001 and 2021 through the lens of framing theory (Entman, 1993) with the peace journalism concept (Galtung, 1986). For this aim, a mixed methodology is employed. On one hand, the content analysis discovered that after 9/11 a polarized frame was used to portray the Taliban, something that strongly changed after the war ended. Even though peace is not completely established, the fighters are overall seen from a more humanizing point of view. On the other hand, the semiology analysis found that in 2021 Western coverage still reproduces the Us/Other rhetoric which is reinforced by a misperception of the Arab/Muslim world. Keywords Afghanistan war; framing; peace journalism; photojournalism; stereotypes; information dominance.
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