Media Satire and Political Discourses in Three Periods of Reform, Principlism and Moderation

This paper seeks to examine the effect of changing political discourses on media satire. For this purpose, newspapers representing the two fundamentalist (Kayhan) and reformist (Jame’e, Tous, and Sharq) factions have been scrutinized in the first year of coming to office of the seventh, ninth and eleventh governments. The theoretical framework of this research is the triple theories of satire, Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory and the social responsibility of the mass media.
For this purpose, written and visual satires of 144 issues of these newspapers have been examined applying qualitative content analysis. The findings of the study showed that the reformist press, in contrast to the principlist faction, was influenced by a change in political discourse, and contrary to Bakhtin's theory, media satire, not in a closed atmosphere, but in a more open political context, moves towards critical satire.