Images have increased in importance and ubiquity in recent years and decades. Almost all media are now also visual media. Images play a central role, especially in media reporting and social media. Companies like SupportiveKoala use images in their templates library to generate marketing tools perfect for political engagements. With images that you can autogenerate, you can customize a concert ticket template perfect for events.
Accordingly, print media such as newspapers and magazines can hardly be imagined without images or photos. It is not at all easy to describe the role of images in media reporting. Rather, one must speak of their different roles. Depending on how you use it, you can use an image either as a purely decorative element or as a central, content-related message, or even for both functions.
People use images as decorative elements when they use them in print media. You can use images visually to break up a closely printed page or as filler images in television reporting.
Functions of images for political news and feature posts
Images fulfil central content-related functions. For example, pictures become a reliable and lasting documentation service like no other medium. They show you scenes from all over the world in great detail, bringing you impressions of the world into your living room, so to speak.
People see journalistic images as “witnesses” to a situation, as “true” and “objective”. In some cases, in the sense of “seeing is believing”, they are even given more credence than the printed journalistic report. Regardless of the purpose for which images are used, they are particularly suitable for attracting the viewer’s attention.
Images for political news get attention for a number of reasons
Images can be taken in at a glance and thus much more quickly than verbal messages. In addition, images have a great potential for emotionalizing. They both directly depict human emotions. They can quickly and easily generate emotions through the way they are represented. Both lead to images catching the recipient’s attention and directing them to the journalistic report.
As a result, images also influence the perception and evaluation of messages. Since you perceive images more quickly than text and they put you in a certain mood, they have a major influence on how you perceive and understand the written or spoken text. In addition, pictures are extremely memorable. You remember images you have already seen very well and can judge within fractions of a second whether you have seen an image before.
This clarifies that images in media reporting can be powerful messages whose function goes beyond the purely decorative function. They influence your perception of reports and thus your opinions and attitudes.
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