Visual Storytelling and the Political Hero in the Age of Dis-/Misinformation: A CMDA approach

This article examines the role of visual storytelling in the construction and manipulation of political heroism in the contemporary post-truth era, characterized by disinformation, misinformation, and highly polarized digital communication. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and extending it to a Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CMDA) framework, the study investigates how verbal and visual resources interact to frame political leaders as heroic figures and to shape public opinion. The analysis is grounded in the concepts of intertextuality, interdiscursivity, framing, positioning, and Intertextual Thematic Formations (ITFs), and foregrounds the ideological functions of master narratives, myths, and cultural archetypes. Focusing on two paradigmatic case studies from U.S. politics – the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024 and George W. Bush’s self-legitimation during the War on Terror – the article shows how images and narratives are remediated across media platforms to monumentalize political leaders as resilient, divinely sanctioned, or morally righteous heroes. Through detailed multimodal readings of iconic photographs, media covers, political speeches, and historical artworks (notably Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People), the study demonstrates how ideological positions are strategically naturalized, power asymmetries obscured, and boundaries between fact and fabrication blurred. The article argues that visual media do not merely document political events but actively construct reality by mobilizing emotional appeal, aestheticization, and moral polarization. By revealing how political storytelling exploits archetypal narrative structures and cultural myths such as the American Dream and American Exceptionalism, the study highlights the urgency of developing critical multimodal literacy as a key civic competence. Ultimately, the paper contributes to scholarship on political communication by showing how CMDA can expose the hidden mechanisms through which post-truth narratives legitimize power and manipulate collective belief.