The reflection of political revolutions of Arabic countries in Middle-East and North Africa in media: A comparative study of BBC Persian and IRNA websites

This article aims to compare BBC Persian and IRNA websites on how they reflected political revolutions happened in Middle-East and North Africa. The methodology of this article is content analysis. The statistical population of this research consists of whole related news reported in these two websites in 2011. The main issue of this article is to show, how BBC Persian and IRNA websites reflected political revolutions in Middle-East and North Africa and what the difference is between these two websites on this matter. The findings show there is not a significant difference between above mentioned websites on how they reported Middle-East and North Africa revolutions. It means IRNA and BBC Persian news coverage was the same. The two sites assigned the majority of their space to news. BBC Persian has used reports, analysis and news commentary more than IRNA. The News Element has been used more in IRNA website was “who” while BBC Persian has most applied “what”. The News Value has been used more in IRNA website was “reputation” however BBC Persian has most used “conflict”. The orientation of the most contents of these two websites towards government, were negative. The orientation of the most contents of these two websites towards people, were neutral. Both IRNA and BBC Persian websites had not used special framework in representing the Middle-East and North Africa events.