A critical discourse analysis of the representation of Syria's events in Iranian and American press applying Van Leeuwen's (2008) approach

This article attempts to analyze the English and Persian (Keyhan and Washinton Post) press applying Van Leeuwen’s (2008) approach. The author attempts to show that ideologies of the press leaders are conveyed to the writers of the newspapers’ articles and then displayed in the texts. The objective of the study is to find an answer to these question that how the political issues of Syria is represented in the Iranian and American newspapers and if there is a difference, in what way it can reveal their owners’ ideologies. The paper represents “social acts” in the form of five oppositions in ten texts extracted from 11 Jul. to 20 Aug, 2011 and investigates the effect of these oppositions in each discourse. The results showed that the press represents the political issues in accordance with its government and the writers have utilized the discoursal tools to convey their ideologies to the readers. Also, the oppositions of material-semiotic, activation-deactivation, agentialization- deagentialization, and concretization-abstraction have been differently represented in the English and Persian press discourse rooted in the difference in the owners’ perspective.