Front Cover Imagery and the Social Construction of the Vietnam War: A Case Study ofLIFEMagazine's Iconology and its Impact on Visual Discourse

Abstract

War coverage in the media, its impact on people's perceptions of wars, and its influence on political actors have increasingly been analysed in political communication research. In recent times, there has been a special focus on television war coverage. In this study, the coverage of the Vietnam War in LIFE magazine, the most famous photo magazine of the 1960s and 1970s, is analysed. An iconographic analysis of all the covers devoted to the war in Vietnam (1960/65–1975) helps to identify different periods of the visual construction of the reality of the Vietnam War. Ambivalences and a polysemic variety of competing interpretations which are probably typical for any war coverage become obvious. Those results support the assumption that the growing rejection of the Vietnam operation by US citizens was not the effect of a supposedly homogenous, let alone unambiguous, presentation by the media, but rather of recipients transforming the construction of the social reality of the Vietnam War.

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