MEDIA DISCOURSE AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS: FOCUS ON THE REPRESENTATION OF IRAN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM IN THE MEDIA

Abstract- After the 1979 Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic government in Iran and the change in political perspectives, the nuclear programme of Iran changed into a controversial issue between Iran and the West. Iran’s nuclear programme was featured as one of the most important topics in newspapers and the media since then. It was told that Iran and the West (esp. US) have been on the edge of a war before The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) so the agreement signed in Vienna on 14 July 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 on Iran’s nuclear programme was a real turning point since the beginning of the controversy. In this PhD thesis I looked at the role of language and media discourse in the coverage and representation of events related to Iran’s nuclear programme from January to July 2015, during Barack Obama’s administration, which brought about an important change in the attitude towards Iran’s nuclear programme in both the Iranian and the Western media. The main questions this study aimed to seek a reply are:1) How were events, players and policies related to the Iranian nuclear programme question portrayed in the media, in Iran and the West respectively in the period under consideration? 2) What was the role of language and media discourse in the dissemination of information about events related to Iran’s nuclear programme in both the Iranian and the Western printed media? 3) How the main actors and the most important themes were presented in the Persian and the Western newspaper articles on Iranian nuclear discourse? 4) To what extent did the views put forth by the two sides of the negotiations differ in the six months before the JCPOA? Unlike the previous studies, for the English language corpus, the articles of both English and American newspapers have been selected to widen the spectrum of the viewpoint of the West regarding to the issue: “The Washington Post”, “The New York Times” (two American newspapers), “The Guardian” and “The Times” (two British newspapers). For the Persian language corpus I selected four significant newspapers in Iran form two important political parties (two reformist newspapers “Shargh” شرق and “Etemad” اعتماد, and two principalist newspapers “Keyhan” کیهان and “Resalat” رسالت). The Western corpus has been collected from Lexis-Nexis which provides electronic accessibility to legal and journalistic documents. The Persian News articles were gathered from an archive of Iranian press called “Magiran” www.magiran.com. I used critical discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary approach which is very popular to study news discourse and generally to the study of discourse that views “language as social practice” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). At the same time I profit important benefit of the corpus-based approach to discourse analysis which is reducing research bias. The study provides confirmation that underlying ideological filters frame the news, working most often as an invisible hand, which makes every media text biased even when ostensibly reporting the same facts, in different language versions. The use of different linguistic resources frames the same news event differently, relying on different assumptions and triggering different interpretations. The discourse is clearly differentiated as for example the headlines differ in length, thematic structure and quantity of information given, lexical choices & syntactic and functional structures, depending on the assumed background information of the two audiences. The idea that recourse to hedges and boosters varies in different cultures can be confirmed considering the overuse of hedges and boosters by the Western journalists. All in all, this PhD. thesis confirms the impact of culture and national identity on political practices in mass media.