Representation of Terrorists in Russian Media: Visual Framing as Reduction of Fear

The paper seeks to investigate visual representation of a terrorist in a non-democratic regime. A subjectless figure of terrorist in black mask causes fear among the population. Faced with uncertainty, people tend to panic, due to the absence of the well-established model of interaction with such phenomenon. Yet, the image of terrorism itself is constructed through the representation in mass media. Basically, a widespread representation in mass media is an essential condition for the terrorism phenomenon to function at all. According to terrorism studies, the frame of ‘the others’ is tightly attached to the figure of terrorist and prevails in national media. There is a stable inclination (both among citizens and scholars) to percept terrorism as an act of external assault against the state. An act of terrorism is an external message to the government: the order is wrong and has to be changed. Such perception, while being clear for one part, is not so evident on the other: this proneness to frame a terrorist as threatening ‘other’ mainly exists among democracies. Terrorism though is not just an act of destruction, but also the basis of an authoritarian order; from this point of view, a terrorist does not come from outside of the order, but basically builds it up. To justify police actions one would need an enemy who is seemingly external, but actually is a vicarious reason for such a regime to exist. Drawing from these theoretical speculations, we set the following hypotheses. H_1: Visual framing of a terrorist is used to maintain the state of fear, consolidating on the face of ‘the other’, and here we see terrifying yet familiar figure in black mask. H_2:Visual framing of a terrorist is used to reduce fear among the people, constructing a specific and recognizable image of a terrorist. Thus, an image of a terrorist carries a clarifying function and enables the order to sustain against ‘the other’. The image speaks to the observer personally and explains who the terrorist is and what is happening. To test our hypotheses, we use content analysis of the images broadcasted by popular Russian media, such as ‘Ria Novosti’, ‘First Channel’, ‘Interfax’. We use these sources since they obtain large enough audience coverage and provide an open access to the data. Moreover, they give a representative image of Russian Federal media. In content analysis we approach an image as a semiotic system with its own syntax and semantics, consisting of multiple layers of meaning. Along with examining an overall image designation, as it is usually done in content analysis, we use van Leeuwen and Kress approach to the visuals. We try to combine the approaches thoroughly in order to cover both semantic and syntactic parts of an image. The contribution to the study of media framing is the emphasis on the visual representation of terrorists, rather than textual description. The key value is the re-orientation to the figure of the terrorist, elaborating an alternative understanding of the phenomenon and going beyond the frame of 'other'