Faiz Sathi Abdullah

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 (1979–1980) 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.