The Syrian conflict has challenged both the ways of reporting war and its impact on the public. However, only a few empirical studies have tried to assess public reactions to representations of war. In this paper, we use an empirically-based study that combines quantitative and qualitative methods to assess how Swiss audiences react to crisis reporting and visual news framing in French-speaking Swiss media. The study offers a preliminary understanding of how people react to images in the media, especially with respect to military and political contexts, and also builds a visual map of how audiences process information contained in news images of war.