A Study on Membership Categorization of BBC Persian TV: (A Discourse Analysis Approach towards Pargar Programs, focusing on Religious Subjects)

Membership Categorization، first explored as a term by Harvey Sacks in the mid-1960s. The primary efforts of Sacks led to present the Membership Categorization Devices (or MCDs)، in which the categories and their characteristics introduced. This article، studies the procedures of Membership Categorization as a discourse analysis approach، towards Pargar Programs، focusing on Religious Subjects broadcasted from BBC Persian during 2010 to 2012، trying to find key points of Sacks’ work in combination with Norman Fairclough''s semantics of three levels of description، interpretation and explanation. Findings show that just around one of the three words which representing Islam، were relatively positive، while the two of them، were negative and usually based on anti-Islamic stereotypes. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of these programs emphases on one episode (Islam Nature) also shows that Pargar represented Islam as a religious of violence، putrefaction، untruth، anti-modernism، and anti human rights.