Post-September 11 Discourse: The Case of Iran in The New York Times (original) (raw)
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Abstract This study examined how discursive strategies and related linguistic devices were employed by The New York Times (TNYT) to portray Iran after the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, and how the media representation may have contributed to negative and/or positive outcomes in terms of geopolitical relations. The study also investigated how sociopolitical assumptions were manifest in producing news about Iran and how the news discourse continued to shape the power relations between the nation and the U.S. in particular, and the world at large. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a multidisciplinary approach, the analysis focused on 171 front-page TNYT news articles from 2001 until 2009. Analysis of the discursive strategies and linguistic means revealed that the news media depicted an overall negative picture of Iran after the September 11 or “9/11” attacks. The effect of this rather stereotypical construction of Iran in TNYT was that of the negative Other, a nation of people that formed part of George W. Bush’s contentious “axis of evil” thesis–malevolent, untrustworthy, violent, and a threat to world peace.
The ideological construction of Iran in The New York Times
This study used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a multidisciplinary approach to analyse The New York Times (The NYT) news texts in order to examine how systemic structures and properties of language played a role in the portrayal of the Iranian nation and to provide insights into how the information presented in the news texts had ideological implications. Analysis of news discourse in the study concentrated on the headlines and lead paragraphs of The NYT that covered the post-Islamic republic discourse around the Iranian hostage crisis (19791980) and the more recent discourse concerning the Iranian presidential election of June 2009. The discursive analysis showed that there was a tendency to polarize between Us (good, righteous, peaceful, etc.) and Them (evil, violent, etc.) to associate stereotypical negative traits to the out-group. It was found that such ideological representations of the Iranian participants were linguistically realized via the dominant processes of transitivity, thematization, and lexicalization.
This study explores the representation of Iran's nuclear issues throughout forty editorials form a host of American news casting outlets with regard The Iranian EFL Journal December 2009 Volume 5 Iranian EFL Journal 21 to their discursive manipulation at structural and strategic layers. All the editorials were released after declaring the resolution, 1696, by the United Nations Security Council on July 31, 2006. To analyze the corpus, the critical discourse analytic framework of Van Dijk (1998) was adopted as the model for examining the data. The results confirm the CD analysts' conviction about the penetration of bias in the representation of a discursive event, in this case the journalistic debate over Iran's nuclear issues. Likewise, the findings support Van Dijk's ideological circle of overstating the deeds of 'us' (i.e. the Western side of the conflict) and understating those of 'them' (i.e. the Iranian side) by making use of specific structures and strategies.
The Ideological Construction of Iran in The NYT
This study used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a multidisciplinary approach to analyse The New York Times (The NYT) news texts in order to examine how systemic structures and properties of language played a role in the portrayal of the Iranian nation and to provide insights into how the information presented in the news texts had ideological implications. Analysis of news discourse in the study concentrated on the headlines and lead paragraphs of The NYT that covered the post-Islamic republic discourse around the Iranian hostage crisis (1979Á1980) and the more recent discourse concerning the Iranian presidential election of June 2009. The discursive analysis showed that there was a tendency to polarize between Us (good, righteous, peaceful, etc.) and Them (evil, violent, etc.) to associate stereotypical negative traits to the out-group. It was found that such ideological representations of the Iranian participants were linguistically realized via the dominant processes of transitivity, thematization, and lexicalization.
American Journal of Linguistics, 2012
Adopting and adapting Theo van Leeuwen's system networks of the representation of social actors, this study explores the morpho-syntactic modes through which social actors implicated in Iran's nuclear activities discourse are represented in news reports of 4 Western quality papers all dealing, one way or another, with the issue of imposing or tightening sanctions on Iran, viz. The Economist, Express, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Using the 5 sets of categories of inclusion/exclusion, activation/passivation, association/dissociation, individualisation/ assimilation, and personalisation/impersonalisation, we try to show the possible asymmetrical patterns in representing a variety of social actors involved, in particular the actors associated with the Western camp and the Iranian government on the issue of the sanctions. The findings have revealed systematic ideological bias in representing the Iranian side, thereby giving a differential treatment of Iran.
2010
Aiming at highlighting the important role of print media discourse in the implicit transfer of the dominant ideology of discourse context, the present data-driven paper demonstrates how the lexical features of repetition and synonymy as well as the structural and thematic features of passivization, nominalization and predicated theme were utilized by the discourse producers to mediate between their own underlying ideology and the target readers' understanding of the events of September 11, 2001. Through a comparative statistical analysis of the print media discourse of the data for the study written in two ideologically opposing contexts of Syria and America, we have tried to explicate how the discourse producers utilized various lexical and thematic strategies to produce different impressions of the event and implicitly impose the underlying ideology on the readers.
Present study, pays to the different representations of the United States, in specific periods of time, before and after beginning the last round of nuclear talks between Islamic Republic of Iran and 5+1 group, especially America's related texts, in Iranian Persian publications as representatives of the two opposite discourses, from the perspective of the critical discourse analysis approach by using socio-semantic features of Van Leeuwen's Model in 2008. To do so, a selection of discursive texts of the two Iranian Persian publications belonging to two competitor groups: Etemad as the representative of reformists and Keyhan, the fundamentalists' representative, have been analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The result indicated although the representation type is highly related to the ideology dominating the minds of the writers of the two political groups reflected in the texts, yet all statistical analysis of the corpus shows that the representations has been changed from a hostile to an amicable style by the initiation of the last round of nuclear talks and it has been perceived that the ideology dominating on the minds of the writers belonging to two competitor political wings, has been reflected in the texts by using discursive socio-semantic features like activation, backgrounding, personalization, personalization, differentiation and in differentiation, etc. This study's finding also states that socio-semantic features are determined by different ideologies, related to power relations and different representations can be explored, described and clarified through the kinds of features applied in the press texts.
2020
Achievement of the nuclear agreement deal between Iran and the world powers was officially praised as a remarkable victory in the history of diplomacy by most of the world. However, elites' reactions to it within Iran and the U.S. were contradictory. This study was launched to investigate opinion discourses in four prominent American newspapers with the aim of finding out how they constructed different versions of the nuclear deal. The first objective sought to identify discursive and rhetorical mechanisms through which authors represented and promoted their versions of reality. The second objective intended to place the newspaper opinion discourses in their context of production and consumption and examine them from cultural and socio-political perspectives. To achieve the above, I drew on three frameworks: Critical Discourse Studies, Classical Rhetoric, and Securitisation Theory (the first time, I believe, that these had been integrated in a single study of opinion discourses). In light of the first objective, I designed a three-dimensional model of analysis examining representational, dialogical, and argumentative features of the opinion pieces by drawing on classical rhetoric, and to accomplish the second objective regarding the relationship between discourses and context, I drew on securitisation theory to demonstrate how these discourses and their context constituted each other. My findings showed that all newspapers, except one (USA Today), took stances of either fully supporting or entirely opposing the nuclear deal, and depending on their positions towards the nuclear deal, they pursued particular patterns of representation and argumentation. Thereby, there were two opposite sets of representative and argumentative strategies employed by the two groups of anti-deal and pro-deal articles. Anti-deal articles, no matter which newspaper they belonged to, portrayed the deal, the negotiations and the countries involved in it in the same way. Pro-deal articles were similarly uniform. All articles in each group applied similar discursive strategies of representation, made similar judgements and predictions regarding the deal, and employed similar argumentation schemes to defend their claims. However, in regards to dialogical features, choice of interactional strategies appeared to be xi more associated with the newspapers' statuses and professional principles than with their critical or supporting positions on the deal. While articles from the elite papers (The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal) opted for a more formal style of writing and a modest authorial voice, those from less prominent papers (New York Post and USA Today) tended towards a more conversational style and a strong voice. Investigating the opinion pieces from a political perspective, I found that they worked systematically towards either treating Iran's nuclear programme as an urgent security matter (securitisation) or taking it into the realm of normal politics (desecuritisation). Anti-deal articles attempted to keep Iran and its nuclear programme securitised through representing the situation as urgent and threatening, and claiming the inefficacy of the deal in halting the threat. Pro-deal articles, on the other, endeavoured to de-securitise Iran or at least its nuclear programme through picturing the achievement of the deal as a victory for the U.S. and a measure to control Iran and halt its threat. Overall, this research showed that the newspaper opinion pieces studied here actively participated in political debates regarding the nuclear deal and appeared to attempt to influence the American foreign policy in line with their ideological beliefs and political interests. 1.3. The linguistic-turn and the Emergence of Critical Discourse Studies and Constructivist International Relations Since the arrival of the linguistic-turn in the mid-20th century, many scholars in social sciences and humanities have focused their research on the role of language, identity, normative beliefs, social construction and, generally, discourse in shaping human knowledge and life. It was in such a discourse-dominated academic atmosphere that critical approaches to discourse studies and constructivist approaches to IR emerged in the 1990s. Critical discourse studies, contrary to previous discourse analysis approaches, such as conversation analysis or pragmatics, advocate a problem-oriented approach to the study of discourse. Critical discourse analysts usually choose social problems, such as discrimination, domination, racism, power abuse, etc., as their research topics and examine institutional, political, gender and media discourses as their sites of investigation. The principal tenet of CDS, which has a constructivist origin, is the idea that discourse is both constitutive of and constituted by society (Meyer, 2001). In other words, society constitutes discourse by shaping ideologies, identities, values and attitudes of discourse-producers (their perceptions in general); discourse constitutes society through disseminating and reproducing or resisting those ideologies, identities, values and other social structures, such as power relations, social policies and institutions. Similar to CDS, the constructivist approach to international relations proposed a new perspective to its field. With its focus on the role of ideational factors in international relations, it opposed the predominant rationalist theories (e.g. neorealism and neoliberalism) that rely on materialistic factors, such as rational-choice decisions, struggle for power, anarchy, and economic interests, in explaining international issues (Walt, 1990; Waltz, 1979). Contrary to them, constructivists argue that nation-states' behaviour and relations are determined, on the one hand, by their domestic ideational factors, such as national identity and culture, and, on the other hand, by systemic ideational factors, such as states' perceptions of each other as enemies or friends (Onuf, 1997; Wendt, 1992). Each of these factors has a discursive character or, at least, a discursive dimension. One of the constructivist IR theories that follows such a
2013
The purpose of this study is to analyze how a well-known online news agency (Washington post) represented the news of Iran and six world powers' nuclear pact. Linking Halliday's Systemic Functional Lingusitics and features of Critical Discourse Analysis to provide a sound theoretical framework for the analysis, it is trying to answer the epistemological question regarding how the knower-journalist-created the new knowledge through the identification of what is valued, undervalued and overvalued. According to Halliday's Systematic Functional Linguistic, the linguistic elements studied in the present study are active and passive voices and lexical choices within the ideational meaning, modality within interpersonal meaning and thematization within textual meaning.
A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Event of in American and Syrian Print Media Discourse
2010
Aiming at highlighting the important role of print media discourse in the implicit transfer of the dominant ideology of discourse context, the present data-driven paper demonstrates how the lexical features of repetition and synonymy as well as the structural and thematic features of passivization, nominalization and predicated theme were utilized by the discourse producers to mediate between their own underlying ideology and the target readers' understanding of the events of September 11, 2001. Through a comparative statistical analysis of the print media discourse of the data for the study written in two ideologically opposing contexts of Syria and America, we have tried to explicate how the discourse producers utilized various lexical and thematic strategies to produce different impressions of the event and implicitly impose the underlying ideology on the readers.