International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science Vol. 1 No. 4 December, 2013 11 The Western Media and Iran’s Presidential Election 2009: The visual framing of a green revolution Sher Baz Khan Jacobs University Bremen, Germany E-mail: sh.khan@jacobs-university.de Abstract This study is a quantitative analysis of photos on the websites of The New York Times, Times, and The Economist to understand the visual framing of Iran’s 2009 controversial presidential election. News photos were categorized into different framing types to answer four research questions, which sought to understand the visual framing of the presidential candidates and their supporters, the protests, and the Iranian feminism. The study found that the runner-up candidate, Mousavi, received more visual coverage compared to the incumbent reelected president, Ahmadinejad. The protests were framed as violent, uncontrollable, and revolutionary in nature, and as enjoying mass support across different segments of the Iranian society, while young and middle-aged urban Iranian women were dominantly portrayed as the symbol of Iranian feminism seeking a Western-style democracy in Iran. Keywords: visual framing, Iranian presidential election, Iranian feminism The Western Media and Iran’s Presidential Election 2009: The visual framing of a green revolution It was the most important event in the history of Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The opposition had launched countrywide protests after the runner-up candidate and former Prime Minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, called the June 12, 2009 presidential election stolen. Officially, Mousavi had lost the election to incumbent President, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, but he had sought reelection, and threatened to stage what his campaign architects propagated as a “green revolution” if his demand was not accepted (Hossein-zadeh, 2009; Dreyfuss, 2009). The Western media had heralded the event as a ‘revolution’, ‘counter-revolution’, ‘Twitter revolution’, and a ‘green tsunami’ (Keller, 2010; Schectman, 2009). Iconic news photographs of violent protesters, containing visuals of fire and blood, mixed up with the opposition’s symbolic green color, were splashed up on the Western media as the metaphor for the harbinger of a change, which could transform the theologian state of Iran into a West-like democracy and free market economy (Roberts, 2009; Meyssan, 2009). Analogies were drawn between the 2004-05 Orange Revolution, which had been catalyzed with the help of mobile technologies in the Ukraine, and the post election protests in Iran, as the Iranians displayed an unprecedented reliance on mobile phones and social media to organize and locate protests and to reach out to their compatriots, the international