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New media technologies present greater opportunities for the unguarded and personalized aspects of war to be shared in public spaces, including an element that militaries prefer remains unseen: the depiction of "our boys" killing. This article examines how soldiers' transgressive visual practices of posing with dead bodies during the war in Afghanistan are re-presented in the mainstream UK press, and analyses the reactions garnered from group interviews with serving military media operations personnel, veterans' groups and forces families. Contradictory impulses are revealed in the news media's outraged revelling in the presumed scandal, and in the focus group participant responses, many of whom reject the premise for the news story whilst also acknowledging common experiences of combat and the desire to show others "what war's like". The article therefore contributes to debates on the news mediation of amateur snapshot images, the imbrication of photographic practices in wartime experience and the limitations of the news media as national moral arbiters. In prioritizing a methodological and analytical focus on the (military) audience rather than the news coverage, the article highlights how engagement with journalistic images and texts can act as a catalyst for identity-affirmation and for thinking critically about the military- media nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the visual coverage of civilian casualty incidents in the first month of the Iraq invasion in 2003, drawing on a detailed and comprehensive content and framing analysis of Iraq war photographs printed in seven British national newspapers. The study found that around 7 per cent of all Iraq-related news photographs dealt with the issue of civilian casualties (including journalists and non-Iraqis), across tabloid and 'quality' press titles. However, the prominence, treatment and functions of civilian casualty photographs varied greatly among particular newspapers, and not always in a predictable manner considering the papers' editorial positions on the conflict. The article details the study's findings on the varying occurrence of casualty-related photographs, and analyses the ways in which such events were pictorially and verbally framed; whether by graphically representing the human cost of the war or, alternatively, by 'disappearing the dead' through visual and rhetorical means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the 2003 Iraq invasion was not wholly framed as a ‘humanitarian intervention’, the rhetoric of bringing liberation, democratization and human rights to the Iraqi people was widely advanced by the coalition and supporters as a legitimating reason for war. This article assesses the role played by press photography in legitimizing or challenging this crucial framing during the invasion across a range of UK national newspapers. Privileging visual content in research design, the study presents selected results from a comprehensive content and framing analysis of press photography during the invasion period (March–April 2003), specifically examining the prominence and treatment of photographs in the humanitarian-related visual coverage, along with the accompanying words used to define, support or detract from the events depicted. While finding that the rationale of humanitarianism generally played well for the coalition during this study period, this article explores the problematic nature of the narrative of liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]