Author(s): Alyssa Bayles
Mentor(s): Joy McMurrin, Florence Bacabac
Institution UTech
This paper argues the importance of incorporating ethical communication into journalism to potentially repair the public’s trust in news organizations by analyzing visual rhetoric. Factors impacting journalism are taken into consideration, including social media, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. This research proposal contains a design for research aiming to answer two questions: (1) How do the social media platforms of Fox News and CNN represent news articles through their visuals? (2) How do illustrative elements impact ethical communication from a visual rhetoric lens? The proposed research consists of qualitative research, primarily focusing on content analysis by analyzing the visual rhetoric of both platforms. The analysis will consist of comparing two news organizations with commonly differing viewpoints, Fox News and CNN, to see how the portrayal of their content is different and if it could affect the trust of the public. There will be five different platforms analyzed during this research: TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, and the website. Each of these platforms will then have three posts analyzed and thoroughly evaluated to see the potential impact visual rhetoric is having on the audience through their posts and if ethical communication is applied. The objective of selecting the three posts on each platform is to observe a variety of content being published by the news organization. The website, since no posts are available, will be analyzed based on the home page. Thus, the ultimate goal of this research is to expand the knowledge of how visual rhetoric could impact journalism, specifically the trust between the public and news organizations. The study will examine the two different news organizations’ portrayals of news and the influence it has through visual rhetoric while ultimately highlighting the needed change in journalism by incorporating ethical communication.