An Analysis of Iranian /Non-Iranian Press Articles on Nuclear Negotiations between Iran and 5+1 Countries

One of the most significant and controversial issues in the contemporary world of politics is the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the last twelve years, the Iranian nuclear program has turned into an international issue. The world and the Iranian media, especially newspapers and magazines systematically covered the proceedings of the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the group of 5, and offered a full converge of the negotiations. Therefore, there is a huge corpus of editorials in newspapers that can tell us about biases and hidden ideologies affiliated to the owner of media and those in power in relation to Iran‘s nuclear program. In order to have a better picture of the newspaper texts used for reporting the Iranian nuclear program with regard to language and contextual factors, the present study was conducted adopting a critical discourse analysis approach. Twenty five newspaper editorials published immediately after the negotiations within the time frame of April and July 2015were extracted from The New York Times, China Daily, Moscow Times and Tehran Times. These editorials were analyzed adopting Fairclough‘s (2001) critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework as well as Huckin‘s (2002) and Long et al.‘s (2005) linguistic sub-categories. The frequency of each category was calculated and the data were analyzed through Kruskal Wallis test and the Mann-Whitney U post-hoc test. The findings pointed to differences among the political discourse of newspapers with respect to attitude and lexical, syntactic and propositional choices. Analysis of newspaper selections from the official expert reports also shows a strong journalistic preference for selecting and emphasizing information relevant to contemporary political discourses.