Heroism to tragedy: A social semiotic analysis of visual framing in Ukraine–Russia and Israel–Gaza conflicts

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative visual approach to the photography of war by international news media, that is, CNN, BBC, and Al-Jazeera English to two conflicts, the Russia–Ukraine and Israel–Palestine Gaza. We use visual grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen and framing theory by Entman to analyze the meaning-making process in images in terms of their representational meaning, interaction, and composition. The authors employed a parallel case study research design to compare two cases: the Russia–Ukraine and Israel–Palestine conflicts in Gaza. The findings showed that Gaza conflict-related pictures were primarily understood as tragedy, with civilian casualties, devastation, and human suffering. By comparison, the images in Ukraine, despite also being tragic, had more heroic and legitimizing depictions of the leaders, soldiers, and national symbols. Additionally, Western media were more likely to focus on Ukrainian resistance and diplomacy as well as empathy toward victims as an act of Eurocentric solidarity, but Al-Jazeera focused on Palestinian suffering and resistance. Across both conflicts, Ukrainians were consistently visually coded as active agents entitled to resist, whereas Palestinians were consistently visually coded as helpless sufferers, a pattern we treat as the study’s central finding and the clearest evidence of an enduring Eurocentric hierarchy of whose suffering, and whose agency, is made to matter.