Beach day or deadly heatwave? Content analysis of media images from the 2021 Heat Dome in Canada

During extreme heat events (EHEs) the public often learns about health protective actions through the media. Visual news coverage can act as a powerful tool to help convey complex health protective actions to the public. Despite the importance of images in helping the public understand the risk, there has been no systematic analysis to assess what images have been used by media outlets in Canada during EHEs. This paper helps to fill that gap by analyzing how the Canadian media visually communicated the risks of extreme heat to the public during the unprecedented 2021 Heat Dome. A review of thousands of online news media articles published about the 2021 Heat Dome in Canada was conducted on five subscription news databases. Overall, 845 images were coded to identify denotative, connotative, and ideological content. Only 16