An evolving body of research generally referred to as visual politics has brought the heavy research focus on linguistic modalities of political communication closer to parity with visual emphasis. The study reported here transcends this schism by joining momentum toward multimodality as an ontological departure point for research. We expanded an existing visual instrument into a multimodal one and provided evidence that it reliably captures character framing of political candidates (stateliness, compassion, mass appeal, ordinariness, and sure loser) in German, Polish, and United States commercial online news. We focused on election coverage in these countries because they represent three distinct political and media systems (democratic-corporatist, polarized-pluralist, and hybrid) of the Global North. The quantitative content analysis sample we used spans 2,688 online news stories with seven political candidates identified in 6,560 cases across six modalities (still images, moving images, frozen video images, text, audio, and superimposed text). We found support for the hypothesis that political and media system latencies affect how news media frame the character traits of political candidates in both visual and linguistic modalities. Specifically, the competitive tendencies of majoritarian democracies manifested more clearly as candidate-centered, simplistic, and polarizing character framing in US media content than in journalistic output of multiparty consensus democracies. For example, US news media were more consistent in their portrayal of election winners and losers than German and Polish news media, emphasizing stateliness, compassion, and ordinariness in the winner while unambiguously assigning the negative sure loser frame to the election loser.

中文翻译：

---

在线新闻中政治候选人的跨国和多模式性格框架：政治和媒体系统分类重要吗？


一个不断发展的研究体系（通常被称为视觉政治）使对政治传播的语言模式的重点研究与视觉强调更加接近。这里报道的研究通过加入多模态作为研究本体论的出发点，超越了这种分裂。我们将现有的视觉工具扩展为多模式工具，并提供证据证明它可靠地捕捉了德国、波兰和美国商业在线新闻中政治候选人的性格框架（庄严、同情心、大众吸引力、平凡和注定的失败者）。我们关注这些国家的选举报道，因为它们代表了北半球三种不同的政治和媒体体系（民主社团主义、极化多元主义和混合体系）。我们使用的定量内容分析样本涵盖 2,688 条在线新闻报道，其中涉及 6,560 个案例中的 7 名政治候选人，涉及六种模式（静态图像、动态图像、冻结视频图像、文本、音频和叠加文本）。我们发现支持以下假设的假设：政治和媒体系统的延迟会影响新闻媒体如何以视觉和语言方式塑造政治候选人的性格特征。具体而言，多数民主国家的竞争倾向在美国媒体内容中比在多党共识民主国家的新闻产出中更明显地表现为以候选人为中心、简单化和两极分化的性格框架。例如，美国新闻媒体对选举胜利者和失败者的描述比德国和波兰新闻媒体更加一致，强调胜利者的庄严、同情心和平凡，同时明确地将负面的肯定失败者框架赋予选举失败者。