| 英文摘要 |
The Bucha incident in April 2022 represents a pivotal media event in the visual culture of contemporary warfare. Following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the outskirts of Kyiv, the rapid global dissemination of images depicting civilians scattered in streets and mass graves transformed Bucha from a physical location into a potent symbol of war atrocities. While the literature has extensively examined textual narratives and static photojournalism, the role of digital video news and specifically on platforms like YouTube in constructing the meaning of death through visual strategies remains under-researched. This paper presents how Taiwanese mainstream media reconstructed the Bucha incident through YouTube news coverage, focusing on the construction and translation of death-related visual symbols within specific political and cultural frameworks. Adopting a post-structuralist stance, this study treats news imagery not as a neutral record, but as a constructed truth-effect, examining how domestic media interpret and recontextualize distant symbols of death within local conditions.
Theoretically, this study draws on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics and Judith Butler’s concept of grievable lives, applying them to the field of visual representation. Rather than focusing on the administrative management of death, it examines how media institutions function as cultural translators that construct the symbolic meaning of death within a localized media landscape. Central to this analysis is the concept of the“Space of Death,”defined here as a symbolic landscape reshaped by media to mobilize moral and political responses. By focusing on the semiotic management of bodies and mourning rituals, this study connects war reporting theories with the visual presentation of video news, analyzing how representation is negotiated among professional journalistic norms, local geopolitical alignments, and the demand for visual impact in the digital attention economy.
Methodologically, this study methodologically employs a mixed-methods design combining quantitative content analysis with qualitative narrative semiotics. YouTube serves as the primary data repository, from which a systematic sample of 385 news videos published by official channels of mainstream Taiwanese media is analyzed. The quantitative phase involves coding visual variables including the frequencies and types of death-related symbols, victim characteristics, source attributions, and cinematographic techniques. The qualitative phase employs narrative-semiotic analysis to trace how visual fragments are organized into coherent moral narratives and how recurring symbols are positioned within the report’s explanatory and evaluative structure. This approach reveals how Taiwanese media respond to international narratives while reconstructing these symbols for a local audience.
The findings reveal that the vast majority of sampled news coverage features visual symbols of human remains, establishing the corpse as the central thematic anchor. The most prevalent symbols are body bags, mass graves, and recovery personnel, which collectively form body bags, mass graves, and recovery personnel collectively form the visual infrastructure of the Space of Death. Analysis of victim demographics indicates that an overwhelming proportion of identifiable corpses are adult males, typically positioned in public spaces such as streets or trenches. This visual construction reinforces the narrative of civilian execution and provides narrative plausibility for allegations against the aggressors.
Regarding cinematographic techniques, the media predominantly presents long and wide shots to establish the scale of the scene, while closeups are reserved to highlight specific bodily traces of violence, serving as visual proof. Video titles and narration use evocative language associated with massacre or slaughter, working in tandem with visual cues to solidify Bucha as a site of extreme violence. Notably, while most graphic imagery undergoes sanitization through blurring, the heavy reliance on Western news agencies indicates high synchronization between Taiwanese media and Western geopolitical frameworks in reconstruction of the event.
The analysis critically identifies a three-stage evolution in narrative construction tied to progression of the conflict and the international response. In the initial stage, Revealing Crimes, the media deploy a high concentration of concrete, high-impact symbols such as exposed corpses and mass graves to construct the Space of Death and to maximize shock. Here, the corpse functions primarily as evidentiary display to assert the truth of the event against Russian denials and to establish the immediacy of violence. As the narrative moves into the middle stage, Seeking Justice, the focus shifts toward body bags, recovery personnel, collective burial sites, and farewell ceremonies. These symbols emphasize tragedy and collective trauma, transforming the narrative from one centered on proof-making into one organized around mourning. Empathy is mobilized through grief practices, and condemnation is intensified by framing the deaths as a call for international recognition and responsibility. Finally, in the stage of International Sanctions, these symbols are densely layered through rapid editing and reiterated headlines, shifting from literal evidence toward abstract moral appeals. By this time, Bucha’s deaths are reconstructed as icons for defending human rights and democratic values, providing symbolic justification for sanctions and collective justice. Data reveal that the frequency of explicit death imagery declines as the narrative’s moral and political alignment becomes more stable.
The findings overall suggest that Taiwanese media’s reconstruction of Bucha is deeply influenced by structural asymmetries in the global information chain. Even while adhering to professional norms of image sanitization, attribution practices, and occasional balancing gestures, the underlying narrative remains tethered to Western-centric geopolitical frameworks. The disproportionate reliance on international agencies reveals an asymmetric flow of information that shapes narrative possibilities. In this context, YouTube enables local media to participate in the reproduction of global structures of seeing, reinforcing which lives are treated as grievable and how distant suffering is interpreted through the lens of democratic alignment. The strategic deployment of death symbols performs multiple functions: authenticating allegations of war crimes, mobilizing emotional response, and establishing a symbolic connection with a global moral community.
By integrating, this study demonstrates that the visual representation of death is a powerful mechanism for narrative construction and moral mobilization in platformed war reporting. Taiwanese mainstream media, acting as cultural translators, maintain professional distance through technical means while selectively emphasizing symbols that align with dominant international interpretations. Integrating large-scale visual coding with narrative-semiotic analysis, this paper contributes to debates on media power, the ethics of representation, and the politics of witnessing distant suffering in an interconnected yet unequal global media system. Understanding how the Space of Death is assembled through recurring symbols, audiovisual techniques, and geopolitical translation clarifies how contemporary warfare is fought not only on the ground, but also through the symbolic work of the digital screen. |
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