Media images of the Muhammad cartoon crisis in the dailies Libération and Le Devoir in February 2006
As a complement to text-based media, images transmit subjectivity through their respective adopted positions and strategies. Like written text, photographs used for informational purposes are subject to multiple interpretations, or risk being too general to be of any value. In this paper, we examine the photographs published in the newspapers Libération and Le Devoir during the heated debates over the Muhammad cartoons. By means of a side-by-side comparison of the photographs published in these two French-language dailies, we point to the differences and similarities in the treatment of this crisis and, beyond that, illustrate how religion and Islam is portrayed in the media in France and Quebec.