Picturing the Iraq War

This study reports the findings of a visual content analysis of 1305 Iraq War-related photographs appearing in the US press, represented by The New York Times, and the British press, represented by The Guardian . Overall, the two newspapers visually portrayed the Iraq War differently. Further, the more spontaneous or direct coverage of actually ongoing events were rare at best, and were exclusively found in photographs that ran in The Guardian. One aspect of the pictorial coverage, however, seems unprecedented: the emphasis on the human cost of the war focusing on Iraqi civilians. Moreover, images of loss of military life were scarce but still available.