Photographs of presidential candidates in czech newspapers ahead of elections of 2013

Master's thesis Photographs of Presidential Candidates in Czech Newspapers ahead of Elections of 2013 compares the visual coverage of nine presidential candidates in the photographs published in three national broadsheet newspapers Lidové noviny, Právo and Hospodářské noviny during the period of four weeks before the first Czech direct presidential elections in January 2013. The theoretical part of the thesis summarizes literature probing the visual framing of politics and the influence of photographic images in media on audiences and their decisions in elections. The quantitative content analysis compares the number of each candidate's pictures in the Czech press in order to determine whether the visual coverage was balanced or not and whether this could have affected the election results. It also verifies the hypothesis that newspapers tend to publish more pictures of the candidates with similar political orientation. Besides that, the thesis also compares how each of the journals uses photography illustration by examining the size, placement, type, caption length and authorship of the pictures