Visualising legitimacy: An analysis of medicinal cannabis images in Australian news

Abstract

This paper reports on a visual framing analysis of Australian online news media images of medicinal cannabis (MC) from 2014 to 2021. It reports on two themes - people and place, and plant and place. The first theme reveals that images of MC users, including children, and familial caregivers were commonly emplaced within quotidian middle-class, suburban, domestic settings, thereby demarcating them from recreational cannabis users. The second theme situated cannabis as a plant in spaces which defined it visually as an agricultural product, pharmaceutical drug, herbal medicine, and less commonly as a recreational drug. This disparate photographic storyline blurred the boundary between recreational and medicinal cannabis.

Keywords: Framing; Medicinal cannabis; Visual analysis; Visual geography; news media.