تمثيل قوات الحشد الشعبي في تقارير اخبار البريطانية و الإيرانية عبر الإنترنت: تحليل نقدي للخطاب

The Representation of Popular Mobilisation Forces in Online British and Iranian News reports : A Critical Discourse Analysis

The current study compares and contrasts the depiction of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (henceforth, PMF) in the selected 12 news reports of two opposing news agencies: British and Iranian, from a critical discourse analysis perspective. The British include BBC and Guardian while the Iranian include Tehran Times and Financial Tribune.
The study aims at (1) highlighting different strategies used by both samples to represent PMF, (2) identifying the most and the least employed strategies by both samples to depict PMF, and (3) demonstrating the way British and Iranian news reports encode ideologies in the context of PMF representation.
The collected data are analysed by using an eclectic model whose categories are incepted at two levels of analysis; micro and macro. It includes Reisigle and Wodak’s discursive strategies (2001), van Leeuwen’s sociological categories of actor representation (2008), Halliday’s transitivity (2004) at the micro level, and van Dijk’s approach of ideology and discursive strategies (2000) at the macro level.
After analysing the collected data qualitatively and quantitatively, the study demonstrates how all macro- and micro-strategies adopted in the eclectic model are used by both samples, but with different percentages and, consequently, different ideological impulses. Moreover, the outcomes of the micro level display that referential strategy is the most frequently used strategy, while argumentation strategy is the least frequently used one by the British sample. Conversely, the Iranian sample mostly employs predicational strategy and minimally uses argumentation one. At the macro level, on the other hand, the most prevalent macro strategy adopted by British news reports is the one of negative other-representation, while positive self-representation strategy is mostly employed by Iranian reports in representing PMF. Furthermore, the selected news agencies employ different Islamic and political ideologies in order to represent PMF.