Irish News Research Articles

Riots or revolution? A framing analysis of the Mahsa Amini protests in U.S. and Iranian media

This study examines the framing of the Mahsa Amini protests in American and Iranian news media using a mixed-methodology approach to analyze 200 online news stories published by two news outlets from each country between 16 September 2022 and 16 December 2022. The findings show that CNN and Fox News, despite being often seen as partisan news outlets with polarized ideological views, covered the events similarly: they framed the protests positively but engaged in orientalist discourse regarding the hijab. In contrast, Iranian media; Press TV and The Tehran Times, portrayed the protests negatively as part of a foreign agenda and neglected the hijab issue. Both countries’ media coverage aligned with their home country’s governmental interests, politicizing Iranian women to serve their narratives and echoing critiques raised by postcolonial scholars on the perpetuation of the symbolic division between East and West through the use of reductivist frames. This paper provides a framework to investigate the discourses and narratives associated with the coverage of protests and feminist movements in the Middle East. The patterns outlined in this paper can help journalists assess their objectivity and reporting style of social movements and women’s issues in the Middle East for more nuanced reporting.

Analyzing Alternative Futures Facing Iranian News Organizations in the Post-Corona Era

Objective: This study aims to analyze the alternative futures facing Iranian news organizations in the post-Corona era. Methodology: To achieve this objective, a qualitative method was employed in two sections, including semi-structured interviews and the Delphi technique. In the present study, the statistical population comprises media managers and communication faculty members. A purposive sampling method was used to collect the sample. Findings: The research findings indicate that increased speed in content production, audience inclination towards using capsule information, the decline of official media with the development of social media platforms, the phenomenon of influencers and their news authority, the use of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and augmented reality in media and news production, the reduction of print media, the decrease in face-to-face communication content, the increase in superficial content, and the expansion of podcast use are considered the most significant transformations in the content produced by news organizations, especially from a technological perspective, in the future. Additionally, based on the results obtained from data analysis in the Delphi section, the most influential factors on the alternative futures facing Iranian news organizations in the post-Corona era are, respectively, the management and governance of the internet, algorithms, and big data, and the transformation of each individual into a separate information source. Conclusion: Therefore, any organization, including media organizations, must incorporate these changes into their policy-setting and decision-making processes to ensure their continued existence.

Representations of older people in Irish public broadcaster's online news coverage during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic

The media influences how we perceive and understand the world, groups of people, and events. The media has been criticised for portraying older people and aging predominantly negatively. In 2020, older people became the focal point of governmental responses in the management of the coronavirus pandemic. In this article, we explore how older people were represented in the officially most legitimate part of Irish news media during the first year of coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. A sample of 137 articles was drawn from Ireland's national broadcasting company (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) online news content, and thematic analysis was applied to interrogate representations of older people in these data from a social constructivist perspective. Older people featured as ‘the face of COVID-19’ due to their constant and accentuated framing as especially vulnerable to the virus. Older adults were construed as a burden to the public, families, and the healthcare system and as a risk to healthcare workers. They were portrayed as powerless and rendered almost completely ‘voiceless’ as their own views rarely featured in the news content. The social constructions of older persons during the coronavirus pandemic reflected and exceeded the (typically implicit) ageism in contemporary western societies.

How does the public understand the causes of mental disorders? An analysis of Irish news media before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public perceptions of the determinants of mental illness have important implications for attitudes and stigma, but minimal previous research has explored how causal attributions are spontaneously invoked in everyday public discourse. This study investigated how causal explanations for mental illness are disseminated in popular Irish news media, in the two years before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Keyword searches of a news media database identified 1,892 articles published between March 2018 to March 2022 that mentioned one of six categories of mental disorders: anxiety disorders, mood disorders, substance-related disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, and psychotic disorders. Overall, 25% of the identified articles contained a causal explanation for mental illness. Inductive content analysis revealed the content and prevalence of eight types of causal explanations for mental disorders. Overall, attributions to life events/experiences, the cultural/societal environment, interpersonal relations, and health and lifestyle factors occurred more frequently than attributions to biological or psychological determinants. Life events/experiences were the most common explanation for anxiety and personality disorders, cultural/societal environment for eating disorders, and health/lifestyle factors for mood and psychotic disorders. Interpersonal factors in mental illness aetiology became more salient following the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings emphasise the need for theory and research on lay explanations of mental disorders to account for diversity, both in the range of attributions invoked, and in how attributional patterns shift across time and mental disorders category.

An evaluation of journalistic reporting on schizophrenia in the Irish news media.

Schizophrenia represents one of the most stigmatised of mental disorders. Despite public awareness campaigns to raise awareness and increase understanding of mental health disorders, schizophrenia continues to be poorly understood. In this context, this study aims to provide a descriptive analysis of reporting on schizophrenia in the Irish online print news media. Online printed news articles which made reference to schizophrenia or related terms in 2021, the latest year for which full date was available, were collected. A list of criteria considered good reporting practise on mental illness in the media was curated. Additionally, a scale was developed based on these criteria to assign a valence to each article in terms of characteristics that were either stigma reinforcing or stigma challenging. A total of 656 articles were included in the analysis. A majority of articles were found to avoid stigma reinforcing criteria (e.g. use of pejorative language). By contrast, few characteristics considered stigma challenging criteria were being endorsed (e.g. inclusion of a first person account). Overall sample valences show good reporting practises, but also suggested targets for improvement. While Irish online print news reports on schizophrenia and related illnesses avoid many stigmatising characteristics, many opportunities to challenge stigma remain.

Invisibility while under Scrutiny: Media Portrayals of White Temporary Foreign Workers

Background: Temporary foreign workers (TFWs) in Canada became the focus of public and media scrutiny in 2013 for allegedly replacing Canadian workers. One group of workers escaped the same scrutiny despite working in similar occupational categories—International Experience Canada (IEC) participants, primarily white, young workers from a variety of European countries, Australia, and New Zealand.Analysis: This article explores the significance of the spectre of whiteness to contemporary Canadian migration governance and employs critical discourse analysis, paying attention to the tone of select front-page coverage of the IEC program in two Canadian and two Irish news outlets.Conclusions and implications: The limited coverage of ethnically white IEC participants shielded them from the negative scrutiny experienced by racialized TFWs. “Irish” became a stand-in for the infinite variability of whiteness in Canadian nationhood.

Memory of Persian campaign of Peter the Great in modern Iran

The article investigates the modern historical memory in Iran of the Persian campaign of Peter the Great that became the first serious attempt of Russia to conquer a part of its southern neighbor’s territory. The article analyses Iranian historical memory of these events using relevant research publications of Persian-speaking authors, Iranian news agencies, and schoolbooks. It compares the Iranian perceptions of the Peter’s Persian campaign and of other Russo-Iranian conflicts at the beginning of the 19th century. The author concludes that the Iranians do not view Peter’s campaign as a war and distinguish it from other conflicts of the century. This perception can be accounted for by the short life of the results of the campaign; by the quick, peaceful restoration of the status quo; by the lack of an official state of war between Russia and the governments of Tahmasp II and the shahs from the Hotak dynasty and clashes between the armies of the countries. The Iranian media and educational literature do not mention the Persian campaign, even in the few publications and sections devoted directly to Peter I. Historical literature hardly mentions it either. Such “oblivion” of the main event in Peter’s of the first Russian emperor related to Iran does not stem from the degree of attention to his personality in Iran. He appears in the media more often than many other Russian rulers and draws comparatively much attention in the educational and scientific literature even in comparison with other significant historical figures. Iranian historiography perceives Peter the Great as a ruler who defined a new vector of Russo-Iranian interrogation but not as a person who attempted expansion on the territory of Iran. This experience helps to analyze the history of bilateral relations and the factors influencing the Iranian perception of the Russian image.

Social construction of visual ageism on Iranian news websites during COVID-19

Considering the popularity of websites in social contexts and their significant force in producing collective discourses, attitudes, and patterns of behaviors, this study critically examined the projection of visual ageism on news websites during the COVID-19 pandemic. The social semiotic theory of visual grammar developed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006, 2020) was the theoretical framework for the visual semiotic analysis of photographs. The search for data was conducted between March 2020 and July 2020. The study searching protocol included strings “older adults AND COVID-19”, “the elderly AND coronavirus”, “older people AND COVID-19”, and “old people AND coronavirus” in Google led to retrieving 71 photographs of Iranian older adults from Iranian news websites. The semiotic analysis of the photographs showed that the Iranian new websites continue to embrace a mindset that degrades the old people.

Analyzing the interorganizational collaborations in crisis management in coping with COVID-19 using social network analysis: Case of Iran.

On January 7, a novel coronavirus, originally abbreviated as 2019-nCoV by World Health Organization, was identified from the throat swab sample of a patient. The virus and its related disease (COVID-19) rapidly spread throughout the world and lead to a global pandemic. Iran as a developing country and one of the most populated countries in the area is dealing with the mentioned crisis. The main objective of the present work is to assess the status of interorganizational collaborations between Iranian organizations in fighting with COVID-19. We utilized social network analysis tools and methods to examine the characteristics of interorganizational collaborations network. Data were gathered through content analysis of seven of the most well-known Iranian news websites. So, the interorganizational collaborations networks between Iranian organizations and its subnetworks are identified, and their characteristics are obtained. Some of the network's features like degree distribution and homophily have been found and analyzed. The most important organizations are identified based on different centrality measures. It is necessary to mention that Basij and the National Committee on combatting corona have a fundamental role in fighting coronavirus in Iran. Also, some of the network-based evidences as the cause of Iran's success in fighting COVID-19 have been found.

Ideological manipulation in political news translation: An actor-network perspective

News translation, and particularly political news translation, is part of a complex recontextualization process in which the target text is often manipulated ideologically to meet the socio-political norms and dominant ideologies of the target society. Many studies have addressed this phenomenon using different textual and discursive approaches, including critical discourse analysis. However, these studies have mostly tackled the ideological manipulation in news translation as an end-product, and the process—particularly from a sociological perspective, including the interactions among human and non-human actants within their networks in news agencies—has remained largely under-researched. The present study is an attempt to shed light on this less-researched part of the phenomenon and analyze the actants and their interactions in political news translation in the Iranian news agencies in light of Actor-Network Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. The data are gathered through in-depth interviews as well as observation of practices in newsrooms. The results reveal that the manipulation process consists of different stages, each of which involves human and non-human actants, forming a complicated hierarchical but circular network. The ideological manipulation is practiced in line with the socio-political requirements of the Iranian context which directly or indirectly influences the involved actants.

Framing similar issues differently: a comparative analysis of Dutch and Iranian news texts

ABSTRACT In this study, the concept of framing is applied in order to show differences in the conception of crime events in the genre of news texts across socio-cultural contexts. Three aspects of framing at the thematic, lexical and syntactic level are defined: occurrence, marked description and prominence and, accordingly, a corpus of one hundred crime-news articles in Dutch and Iranian national newspapers is analyzed. Taking a systematic and replicable approach, it was found that crime-news narratives in the two countries frame crime and crime-related events in different ways with regard to the representation of participants, actions and circumstantial elements. The implication of these different framing patterns is explained in terms of different socio-cultural contexts and discussed with regard to the discourse culture of journalism. The study has implications for further exploration of the interdependence of discourse, context and cognition.

Representation of Information Structure in Persian Spoken Genres: Syntactic devices in focus

There is scarce systematic research on the role of genres and their associated discourse features in Information Structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. The current descriptive, corpus-based study, therefore, aimed to investigate three different genres of Persian spoken language; that is, political, scientific and daily conversation, in terms of their Information Structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive and preposing. To this purpose, 1000 different utterances related to each of the mentioned genres, were extracted from the multi-media archive of IRNA (Iranian News Agency) website and daily conversations of the researchers’ family members and friends, based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework in modeling the Information Structure. The collected data were then transcribed, the syntactic devices were identified, and descriptive statistics were used to see how the above syntactic devices are represented in each genre type. The results revealed that the devices are represented differently in the three genres of political, scientific, and daily conversations. This finding may be of interest to linguists and language theoreticians.

What to read during a pandemic: A case study of ‘book promotion politics’ in Iran

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost every aspect of life. According to data from several countries, book reading has surged since the beginning of the imposed lockdowns. This situation has presented cultural mediators with an unprecedented opportunity to influence their audiences’ reading habits. The current study reports the results of a qualitative analysis of Iranian news websites’ book suggestions during March 2020, the peak of the first wave of COVID-19 in Iran. Through analysing the suggested books’ original language, publication date, genre, and publisher, the study uncovers some of the politics of book promotion in Iran. The findings revealed a high level of homogeneity among the reading suggestions in terms of original language, genre, and publishers, raising the possibility that wider government policies encourage the promotion or marginalisation of certain types of books. Fiction and nonfiction books about the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) dominated the suggestions, while comedy and nonpolitical mystery/thrillers were almost nonexistent. These findings and more are discussed in light of the sociopolitical context in Iran. • Book reading has surged since the beginning of COVID-19-imposed lockdowns. • Iranian news websites published an unprecedented number of reading lists in 2020. • Books about the Iraq-Iran war are disproportionately represented on these lists. • Classic Persian literature and contemporary world literature are underrepresented. • Political affiliations of the websites align with their book recommendations.

Media Bias: A Corpus-based Linguistic Analysis of Online Iranian Coverage of the Syrian Revolution

AbstractThis study explores the influence of a government’s ideology on linguistic representation in a news agency that characterizes itself as independent. It focuses on the coverage of the Syrian civil war as reported by the Iranian news agency Fars, addressing the discursive constructions of anti-government powers in relevant online reports released between 2013 and 2015. Since the Islamic Republic of Iran was a major regional ally of the Syrian government, we questioned the extent to which ideological independence could be expected during a politically critical time frame. Taking a corpus-based linguistic approach, the study explores the semantic macrostructures representing the opposition as well as the lexical clusters and keywords characterizing the news discourse. The findings indicate that Fars’ representation of the Syrian Revolution was, to some extent, biased, despite its claimed independence of the government’s political stance. It excluded the Sunni social actors, suppressed the Islamic faction identity of the rebels and depicted the uprising as a war against foreign-backed militants. The rebels were stereotyped in terms of terrorism and non-Syrians. In addition, the analysis reveals Fars’ tendency to emphasize the power of the government, depicting it as the defender of the Arab land and foregrounding the discourse of international conspiracy against Syria. The results of this work project the dimension of media bias caused by the underpinning political perspective of media institutions.

Clerical modernisers and the media in Ireland: the journalism of Fr Gerry Reynolds

ABSTRACT This article analyses the journalism of Fr Gerry Reynolds in the context of modernisation in Ireland. Identifying Reynolds as a ‘clerical moderniser,’ it describes two periods in which he devoted a substantial amount of time to journalism: 1962–1975, when he worked for Redemptorist Publications and the Catholic Communications Institute; and 1987–1989, when he wrote a column for Northern Ireland’s Irish News. In both periods, Reynolds emphasised Vatican II themes like the priority of individual conscience, laity and women, and ecumenism. It argues that like other clerical modernisers, Reynolds contributed to a cautious modernisation of Irish Catholicism from within.

Voice-over Translation of News Programs on Television: Evidence from Iran

Compared with dubbing and subtitling research, the current literature on voice-over translation is fairly scare, and research has been mainly reported from Europe. Likewise, there are few reports on the topic from an Asian context including Iran. The main goal of this paper is, therefore, to examine voice-over translation in Iranian news broadcasting. The study uses a corpus of English news materials translated into Persian and have been broadcast on Iranian Television. The study has described Persian translation for voice-over from two perspectives: synchronization techniques, and faithfulness and ideology in translation. The overall findings suggest that voice-over translation is a common modality used for translation of foreign news reports in Iran, which entails considerable appropriation and manipulation due to solutions adopted for synchronization and ideological purposes of the news agency.

Culture and discourse structure: A comparative study of Dutch and Iranian news texts

Many studies of structure in present-day Western news texts have shown that the dominant structure is the inverted pyramid, even if the use of a chronological narrative structure is acknowledged. However, the relevant literature has exclusively investigated Western news texts. In this study, we challenge the dominance of the inverted news structure by including a non-Western and less-investigated culture and ask whether textual structure of news texts can differ between cultural contexts. In total, 100 crime news texts from national Iranian and Dutch newspapers were analyzed for both the overall text and the journalists’ statements. Those texts that showed a hybrid structure (combining inverted pyramid and chronology) were subsequently studied qualitatively to understand how chronology is applied in them. News texts from the two cultures were significantly different in their structure. Qualitative analysis of the journalistic statements uncovered a quotation-based structure, a way of news writing in Iranian journalistic statements in which the journalist mainly narrates reporting eventualities that are new to Western eyes. The study offers implications for further ethnography of news and communication, suggesting that the role, pattern and effects of (journalistic) communication can be culture-specific.

Untangling the Web: an Evaluation of the Digital Strategies of Irish News Organisations

Introduction As Ireland’s print media continue to suffer a drop in their circulations, how important is the implementation of a viable and, above all, profitable web strategy, and how extensively are these currently being employed within four Irish news organisations? These include Ireland’s three best selling dailies: The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, and the Irish Daily Star, and a regional newspaper with a notable online presence, the Limerick Leader. This research examines the day-to-day operations of Irish news organisations; the resources devoted to their digital media/online departments, the revenue-generation strategies in place to monetize the work of these departments; and the prioritization given to the various mediums through which information is distributed. These issues have been explored by interviewing the people with responsibility for digital development within these organisations to ascertain what they believe that they are doing both correctly and incorrectly, in their attempts to gain traction for the online news sites within their organisations. Just what does this move online mean to Irish news organisations, and what differentiates those who are moving online from those who are not? What differences exist in their news-gathering approaches and the platforms via which they disseminate news? How far will these organisations go in their pursuit of online revenues? Are paywalls the end-goal, or is the only way to safeguard their futures to adopt the media model that is digital first?

Government, Propaganda and the Irish News Agency

Government, Propaganda and the Irish News Agency

Narratively framing emergent identities in post-agreement societies: patterns of the Northern Irish identity within the provincial media

ABSTRACTThe research analyses ‘Northern Irish’ identity narratives post-agreement, and examines the configuration of frame agendas in terms of individual narrative components. A content analysis utilised news published through 1997–2014 within Northern Ireland daily newspapers – the Belfast Telegraph, the Irish News and the News Letter. A process of manifest coding produced an emergent coding scheme displaying the relative stability of media frames surrounding the Northern Irish identity as broadly partisan; however, there is also a subtle narrative shift of Northern Irish identity across the time periods; and findings of a dominant framing paradigm of political and social conceptions of identification post-agreement.