The Linguistic Representation of Iranian and Western Actors of Iran’s Nuclear Program in International Media: A CDA Study

Abstract

Revealing the unequal relation of power which leads to hegemony in mass media and making audiences aware of this unequal representation of events have been in the center of attention for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for a long period of time. As Fairclough states becoming aware of this complicated process of manipulation of reality through linguistic mechanisms will “ help increase consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others, because consciousness is the first step towards emancipation.” ( 2001, p.1) van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic network of social actors is been considered as a competent framework for linguists and discourse analysts to do so. In this article, we study 50 hard news and articles published in leading international news agencies and newspapers about Iran’s nuclear program during November and December 2010 to analyze the way the social actors of both sides of the quarrel have been represented in the media. The results showed that although the international news agencies and newspapers claim to stay neutral in representing the events, some linguistic mechanisms to represent Iranian social actors differently from the western ones are obvious and Iranian social actors playing role in this case are shown as irrational hardliners while western counterparts are introduced as logical peace seeker ones.