Characterizing Conflict in Pictures: A Multimodal Analysis of Reports of the Agatu-Fulani Crisis of March/April, 2016

Abstract

Newspaper stories are typically not presented solely as text, but are usually accompanied with images. It is also believed that one picture is worth a thousand words (Smiciklas, 2012). News stories therefore lend themselves to a multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), a study of the intersection and interdependence of various modalities of communication within a given context (Royce and Bowcher, 2007). Therefore, as a follow-up to an earlier critical discourse analysis of news representations of the Agatu-Fulani conflict of March/April, 2016 in terms of four parameters: nature of the conflict; the actors; the action and the victims (Olubode-Sawe, 2018), this paper attempts to show how accompanying images contribute to or detract from those characterizations. Only about half of the pictures factually match the stories, and in only a third does the mood match the visual. In some stories, the photos actually subvert the text, telling a slightly different story from that presented in words.