Visualising a Murder Mystery: Shifting Visibilities and Epistemic Uncertainty in Investigative Crime Journalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines how the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang visualises an ongoing unsettled crime event. A qualitative longitudinal multimodal content analysis is deployed for 310 online news stories published between 2019 and 2021 covering Norway’s most infamous unsolved crime in recent years. The study (1) maps out the visual inventory of the case, (2) reconstructs how the victim, the alleged main perpetrator, and the crime scene are represented visually and how their visibilities change in response to shifting epistemic conditions, and finally (3) analyses how visual modes of knowing are used performatively to signal authority and mitigate uncertainty. The findings suggest that photographs serve motivated epistemological purposes in news coverage of contested events as their context-dependent ambiguity can create empathy, cast suspicion, and enable retrospective imagination. The study contributes to the literature on visual journalism and journalistic epistemologies by examining photographs as “infrastructures of inference”, thus highlighting the importance of visual storytelling in mediating journalistic authority.