Presidentkandidater på bild. : En semiotisk bildanalys av den visuella gestaltning av presidentvalet i USA 2016- i svenska nyhetstidningar

Problem statement and purpose of the study: The picture and the visual presentation have an increased importance in news media today. Which means that politicians visual frames can have a great impact on the readers and therefore on the outcome of an election. The purpose of this study is to examine the visual framing of the american presidential candidates of the 2016 election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, to see if there is any sign of stereotyping or personalising, and if the candidate’s gender matters. Women and men have been framed differently by the news media in the past. Men has often been portrayed as the normative politician, while women been portrayed as the female politician. Method: This essay is written by a qualitative method and is the result of semiotic analysis of 16 pictures from the swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. Eight of the analyzed pictures show Donald Trump and the other eight show Hillary Clinton. We analyzed the pictures by denotation and connotation. Main result: Our results showed some significant differences in the visual framing of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Trump is portrayed as an more threatening and serious manner while Hillary Clinton’s framing shows a more emotional and encouraging politician. We also found stereotyping in the visual framing, but not so much personalising. The two candidates gender was for the most part clear in the framing. Hillary Clinton’s frames were those of a woman and Donald Trump’s those of a man. There were differences in the two newspapers visual framing, but they were not as clear as the ones between Trump and Clinton