Images in the Media

Images in the Media

          The United States has found itself falling victim to the growingly more frequent cyber attacks and hacking of confidential information via the Internet in the recent years. In these cyber attacks, or cyber terrorism, corporate, private, and government information is being extracted by tech-savvy individuals. While the first thought of the public citizen is to think that American hackers are behind these breaches in cyber safety, upon review of the IP addresses of the computers used for hacking, it is in fact the Chinese who are organizing these attacks.

          In the New York Times article that announced this discovery, there is an image of a Chinese skyscraper in which the majority of the cyber attacks takes place. This image provides the U.S. citizens who read the article a sense of reality regarding the cyber attacks. When most people think of hacking, they imagine a scrawny man in thick glasses living in his mothers dark basement sitting in front of a giant computer screen. The image provided by New York Times, however, allows the reality of an organized hacking scheme to set it. The image shows an ordinary building, not much different than the ones that millions of Americans work in day to day. This image provides for the reader a supplemental rhetoric that further enhances the conflict of the organized Chinese hacking attempts against United States and the security of confidential information on the web.

          In addition to the New York Times article that outlines the Chinese attempts to hack U.S. information an the image that presents Chinese hacking as an organized, everyday 9-to-5 job, an article on News 24 provides a different image of hacking. The article, which is centered around the same premise as the New York Times article, shows an image of a keyboard with a pirate skull and bones flag in the background. This image attributes a much more volatile and destructive characteristic of cyber attacks. When people see a pirate flag, we often think if the terms “rape,” “pillage,” and “plunder.” While the ordinary person does not attribute the Internet as a medium for such activity, this image reflects the idea that technology can be used for such acts as pirating and harming others.

          Both the New York Times image and the News 24 image provide the reader with an emotional response to Chinese hacking efforts against the United States. The New York Times image, however, strikes the reader as more revealing and shocking, as it is ordinary Chinese business folk that are executing cyber attacks. The News 24 image, on the other hand, provides the reader with a sense of danger that surrounds the Internet. While both these responses are negative in their portrayal of cyber attacks, they are vastly different in their intended specific responses. While the New York Times image acts to be revealing, the News 24 image acts to be slandering.

          Images in the media are used to various degrees of effectiveness and purposes. In these two images that support the articles about Chinese cyber attacks against the United States, both images are effective in evoking a response in the reader. Images are very powerful tools in rhetoric, and both the New York Times and News 24 used specific images to support their purpose.