Kristin Gustafson publishes award-winning paper on “Visually framing press freedom and responsibility of a massacre”

Visual Communication Quarterly published IAS faculty member Kristin Gustafson's co-authored article, “Visually framing press freedom and responsibility of a massacre: Photographic and graphic images in Charlie Hedbo's newspaper front pages around the world,” in November. The article previously won second place top faculty paper for the Visual Communication Division when it was presented at the 2015 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The collaboration with Dr. Linda Jean Kenix examined 441 front-page images published in 367 newspapers on the day following the shooting in Paris of twelve people at or near the Charlie Hebdo office. The aim of the study is to understand how these media visually framed responsibility and the research complicates a uniform understanding of press freedom. It challenges binary thinking about press freedom that fails to recognize nuances in its discussion and media representation. The research builds on ideas about framing responsibility that were explored in Gustafson's M.A. thesis at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a subsequent 2008 publication on how Minnesota newspapers framed a 1920 lynching.