Political Visuals Dominate in the Vernacular News Papers: "A Content Analysis of Front Page Political Visuals of Leading Indian Newspapers"

The newspaper is a medium of news communication which performs the functions of informing, educating, influencing, and entertaining, among others with the use of words and visuals all over the world. Information through the visuals is processed much faster than verbal, it takes about half a second (500 milliseconds) to translate sensing (hearing, smelling, touch) into conscious awareness of these stimuli. Visual elements dominate perception, brain perceives, stores, and processes verbal and visual information mainly on distinct routes and with distinct mechanisms [1].


Political Visuals
Coverage of the political leaders in the newspapers through the visuals is called political visuals. We always see our leader's visuals during rallies, party meetings and press conference through the newspapers. A reader can have the feeling of the event after seeing the photos of political rallies in the newspapers. A reader can understand the meaning of political leader photo after see his or her smile and gestures. Visuals give the actual scene of political circle and our mind understands the visuals very effectively. Findings of neuroscience say, the brain perceives, stores, and processes verbal and visual information mainly on distinct routes and with distinct mechanisms [6]. When a visual and an auditory stimulus occur at the same time, the visual elements dominate perception [1].

Objective of the study
The objective of this study is to analyze the front page political visuals of leading vernacular newspapers in India which concern political news coverage. The Chandigarh editions of these vernacular and English newspapers were considered for this study.

Research questions
• How much area was given to political visuals by each newspaper?
• How many political visuals were carried/used on the front page?
• How many visuals had captions with them?
• How many visuals were used with story and without story on front pages?
• How many visuals were local, regional, national and International?
• What were the sizes of the visuals?

Review of Literature
The front-page is a crucial page for each newspaper and political activities are reported on daily basis and these are mostly along with supporting visuals. Front page is a major selling point of each newspaper and acts like a window to news inside and it attracts the readers to buy newspapers, while and visuals create interest to read newspaper further and specifically the story that goes with it.
Researchers at the Eko [7] [8], The Daily Nation of Nairobi, Kenya. This study shows how three newspapers have used human beings cartoons with animal attributes for satire purposes. David Domke [9], Meg Spratt of University of Washington and David Perlmutter [10] Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge conducted a study "The primes of our times? An examination of the 'power' of visual images?" in 2002 [11]. According to these researchers, images most often interact with individuals' existing understandings of the world to shape information processing and judgments. They find that visual news images • influence people's information processing in ways that can be understood only by taking into account individuals' predispositions and values, and • at the same time appear to have a particular ability to 'trigger' considerations that spread through one's mental framework to other evaluations. James N Druckman [12] of University of Minnesota studied the affect television political behavior. He studied the Kennedy-Nixon debate or listened to an audio version and television version. Television images give significant effects, people believe on personality perceptions in their evaluations. As per the study of Druckman [12] television images matter in politics, and may have indeed played an important role in the first Kennedy-Nixon debate [13].
Joan L Conners [14] of Randolph-Macon College have studied the Political Cartoons representations during the 2004 USA Presidential Campaign. He examines representations of presidential candidates in political cartoons to identify how often references to nonelection themes are made, with particular attention to allusions made to factors from popular culture [15]. As per his study political cartoons give only one of its kind of media message, they offer voters an opinion on the campaign or candidates encapsulated typically in a single image [16].
Michael Griffin [17][18][19] of University of Minnesota and Simon Kaganb of Tel Aviv University have studied the visual imagery in TV spots from the 1992 U.S. presidential election and the 1992 Israeli national elections. As per the study cultural imagery in political campaigns is truly needed to better understand the formation of candidate images, the shaping of campaign rhetoric, and the nature of political myth making [20].
Professor Sandra E Moriarty [21] of School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado and Professor Mark N Popovich [21] of Department of Journalism at Ball State University have studied the 1988 campaign coverage of Republican presidential, vice presidential candidates and Democratic candidates in photographic coverage in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World. They have studied the 15 attributes of photographs, such as camera angle, whether or not the candidate was smiling or frowning, active or passive, and the manner of dress. As per the study findings editors attempted to balance coverage between both parties.
The study of Jennifer Ehidiamen [22] is about the News pictures in Nigerian Newspapers on front-page .The Guardian newspaper and the Punch newspaper were used for the study. Publication of June 2007 was used for this study. The content analysis method was applied in this research. They have used simple random sampling method 15 editions of these newspapers were selected. The photos were studied on the basis of News worthiness, space allocation, the pattern and diverse trend of coverage. Findings of this research showed that Nigerian Newspapers need to improve on the use of News pictures, especially the front-page photographs for the better communication of news worthy messages effectively [23].
Research on the front-page newspaper photographs [24] was done to identify changes in photography in selected major American daily newspapers over a period of 40 years (1936-76) [25]. The content analysis revealed an expected technical and social evolution in the newsroom, pressroom and darkroom. Six newspapers were studied: The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the Washington Post. They were selected on the basis of their national prominence and their availability in microfilm files. Each newspaper was analyzed for a week each month for three years 1936, 1956 and 1976. The analyses were limited to photos on Page 1. Each photograph was examined in terms of size, subject, source, location on page; racial and sex composition, and whether accompanied by an article. The survey years were selected to represent equal intervals for what seemed a long enough period to clearly observe change [26].
There was also an increase in the photos by newspapers staffers. The placement of photos on the page was studied and was noted that editors maintained considerable placement flexibility throughout the period. An increase in the use of the photos used alone was also noticed. The study for sex composition revealed that the use of maleonly photos decreased during the survey period Sengletary, Michael W [27].
Paula Hoffman-Hall, University of Nebraska-Omaha [28], studied the visual agenda of Times and Newsweek after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, presented by media sources, Time and Newsweek magazine [29]. Photographs immediately following the attack, six months late, one year later, and eighteen-months later, were observed in this study. The research produced a total of 493 photographs. Images were coded for the primary subject, portrayal, perspective, topic, and location. Cross tabs and Chi-square tests were run, and the data collected was used to answer the central research question and subquestions developed with the assistance of past research. Significant differences in the visual agenda between Time and Newsweek magazine were found for subject, perspective and topic. Similarities were found in the presentation of the local and portrayal of the primary subject. Significant differences were found for all dependent variables from the results of the test which examined the data over time. The research unfolded a story told from news photographs, capturing a horrifying event that the American people will not forget. Shaun Kohn [30] of University of Oregon studied Men vs. Women in newspapers sports section photographs under the supervision of Kim Sheehan in 2000. This study examines photographs of males and females in newspaper sports sections. A content analysis of sports section photographs from four newspapers covering a 20-year span, starting in 1978, found that gatekeepers attached more salience to male athletes, and presented female athletes in a higher %age of photos indicating dominance, indicating being dominated, and indicating emotion, when compared to males. Additionally, it was found that the presence of female athletes is increasing in the sports section, though there is still a large gender gap in 1998.

A Comparative Study of Photojournalism in American and
Korean Newspapers conducted by the Yung Soo Kim and James D Kelly [31], Southern Illinois in 2005. The content of 628 news and feature photographs in ten elite American and Korean newspapers was analyzed for differences in composition, subject number, and subject identification. The Korean approach to photojournalism was purely descriptive while the American approach was more interpretive [32]. Koreans presented far more news, emphasized the group, and maintained a consistent composition. Americans ran more features, emphasized the individual and varied composition. Differences were explained by culture, normative protocols, and differing media philosophies.

Research Methodology
The newspapers that I have chosen for the study of political visuals on the front-page are The Times of India, The Tribune, The Indian Express, Dainik Bhaskar, Punjab Kesri, Dainik Tribune, Punjabi Tribune and Ajit. These papers are interesting to analyze as they represent three different language readers, English, Hindi and Punjabi all the newspapers are leading newspapers in their languages in India.
For this study, method of quantitative and qualitative content analysis was adopted to examine the political visuals published on the front page of the selected newspapers of Chandigarh edition in the 1 st week of each starting six month of 2001 and 2011. These newspapers represent a large range of readership in India.
A coding sheet is prepared and visual content is coded in various categories for collecting the data. This process was done for each edition of all the selected newspapers under study respectively. The author of this research paper is having 18 years of photojournalism experience and doing research in communication, coded all the sports visuals. For checking coder reliability, Scott's pi formula was used. Fifty visuals were coded twice to get the Scott's pi these visuals were not included in this study. The coder reliability value of Scott's Pi is 0.534 and 80 Percent Agreement.
Content analysis is a research technique for objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication. According to Prasad [33], "It is described as the scientific study of content of communication". For this study, method of qualitative and quantitative content analysis are adopted to examine the presentation, selection of visuals and changing trends in visual communication in the newspaper industry.
Content analysis is used in various disciplines like as communications, political science, history, social sciences, and psychology. This is used in this study to find out the changes in visuals presentation in one decade. Content analysis was introduced by the Harold Lasswell to study the propaganda in the begging. The U.S. government sponsored a project to Harold Lasswell to assess enemy propaganda during World War II, he used the content analysis method to evaluate the propaganda. Content analysis is very effective method to analysis the media images, this method has been used by many researchers in previous newspaper studies to find the answer of newspaper photographs [5]. As per the Birrell "content analysis is a method for examining the message or content of the media such as newspapers, to draw inferences about encoding and decoding practices of the communication system".

Quantitative content analysis
It is an important tool for studying what is actually in the media. As per the Smith [34], "qualitative analysis deals with the forms and antecedent-consequent patterns of form, while quantitative analysis deals with duration and frequency of form" Quantitative content analysis is done after collecting data or exact information from the newspapers. It is considered non biased research and very easy to use for presentations, its results are easily analyzed and more reliable.

Qualitative content analysis
As per the Hsieh and Shannon qualitative research is "a research method for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns".
In Qualitative content analysis method we goes beyond the counting the visuals, quality of the visuals studied in this technique. It gives permission to researchers to understand the social reality in a subjective but scientific manner. The method of qualitative content analysis regularly starts during the early stages of data collection.
Political visuals of all the selected newspapers (2011) on Page one examined in terms of column of visuals, location of visuals, visuals used with story or without story and visuals without caption or with caption. How much space was given to visuals? The study doesn't analyses the visuals carried out by the advertisements.

Data Analysis
I have studied front-page visuals of 1 st week of every month in the first six months of The Tribune. The total numbers of 355 political visuals were published in the 2011. Based on my study, the statistical data% age wise is defined in. The tables have been elaborated and explained.
As per Table 1, the total area during the 1 st week of every month in the first six months of the selected newspapers was 95286.09 Sq cm in 2011. In which 16.74% space was given to all visuals published on the front page and 10.10% area was given to political visuals within the total visuals area in 2011.     Use of visuals with the news item increase the credibility of the news and attract the readers to read the news. As visuals depict reality of the situation which always work as an evidence to show the authenticity of a an event that occurred and published on the newspapers. Visuals break the monotony of news content and evoke readers emotions. Newspapers should prefer to use visuals with each news item. The study shows that Ajit,Punjabi Tribune and The Tribune have published 100% political visuals with story, whereas Dainik Tribune and Times of India have published maximum political visuals without the story, 72.2% and 64% and with story 27.8% and 36% respectively.

As per
Photo captions are one of the most read text in a publication after the titles of news content. The caption gives the important information of the photographs and attract readers to read full news item. The photo caption provides the basic information needed to understand a photograph and its relevance to a common reader. The captions writing is an essential part of the photojournalist work [35]. During the writing of captions all the important elements of news writing is considered [36]. An inadequately written caption can mislead the readers and some time reduce the impact of a good visual and damage the credibility of a newspaper.    In conclusion, the content analysis of front page political visuals of eight leading Indian Newspapers (Five vernacular and Three English newspapers) of 2011, shows significant difference in the use of political visuals on the front page by all the newspapers.