Image-Text Congruency in Legacy Press Coverage of Iran's 2019 Bloody November: A Shift Away From the Protest Paradigm?

Abstract

This article reports on one salient case where the departure from the protest paradigm was partially met, resulting in incongruent multimodal news content. The case involves the nationwide anti-government protests across Iran in November 2019 because of the drastic hike in petroleum prices. This study conducts a content analysis of citizen eyewitness imagery and the coverage of six Western mainstream news outlets. Our findings show that in words, the news pieces legitimized the protests. The majority of imagery, however, delegitimized protests by focusing on scenes of vandalism, fire, and rare depictions of violent police intervention. The observed incongruency could potentially hinder the learning, sympathy, and engagement of readers with the news stories. We argue that more meticulous observation is required by news outlets when selecting visuals to report to achieve a more informed news compound.