Mystification Rate in Persian and English News Articles: A Case Study of the US Presidential Election in 2016

Critical discourse analysis is a new branch of discourse analysis that discusses the whyness of events and deals with information representation. It, in fact, views language as a form of social practice. The present study was undertaken within the realm of critical discourse analysis. It intended to compare Persian and English news articles (based on their application of socio-semantic discursive features) so as to determine the rate of mystification in them. To undertake the study, the version of Van Leeuwen’s (1996) model adopted by Yarmohammadi (2012) was used. The data of the study comprised a corpus of 6 Persian and 5 English news articles – all related to the US presidential election in 2016 – extracted using purposive sampling from Nasim Online and The Guardian newspapers. The results obtained from the chi-square tests revealed that the two newspapers were significantly different in their application of the explicit and implicit discursive features. In other words, explicitness was more prominent in The Guardian newspaper whereas the rate of mystification was more in Nasim Online. The general conclusion drawn from the study was that Persian news articles were less explicit than the English ones. This result was in line with the findings reported by Kaplan (1972).