Visual Media Discourse Analysis of John Howard’s 2007 “Last Road Trip” Campaign

Abstract

This article discusses a relationship between politics and media as shown by an in-depth feature published on Saturday or weekend edition of The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on November 10, 2007[1]. This edition is worth analyzing because the feature that was written by a senior reporter, Michael Gawenda, marked the unpopularity of the 25 Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, in his forthcoming election round. The report was accompanied by two sets of photographs showing snap shots of the incumbent Prime Minister that seemed to construct his negative images. This paper, thus, presents the results of a critical analysis on the photographs based on Fairclough’s model for CDA which involved three interrelated processes of analysis: (1) description, (2) interpretation and (3) explanation of three interrelated dimensions of discourse[2].