Ideological or International Move? A Critical Discourse Analysis toward the Representation of Iran Sanctions in Western Printed Media

Abstract

The media are not neutral, common-sense[d], or rational mediator of social events, but essentially help reproduce preformulated ideologies (van Dijk, 1988, p.11). Adopting the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, the present study focused on the headlines and lead paragraphs of a corpus of twenty news reports released by ten well-established western newspapers and examined the coverage of Iran sanction imposition by western printed media. Working within the ideological framework of news production and reception (van Dijk, 1988, p. 248), this study further explored the western press coverage of Iran sanctions to demonstrate how the arguments made by western newspapers via heads and leads were encoded in ideologically biased discursive patterns (e.g. lexical and grammatical choices, intertextual choices and ideological us versus them binary opposition) in an attempt to justify and legitimize the so-called “international move” against Iran (van Dijk, 1988, p. 248, as cited in Sheyholislami, 2001, pp. 3-4). Interestingly, the findings suggested that there were strong ideological proclivity and orientation in the western newspapers’ reports of the event.