Critical Reappraisal of Citizenship Rights in Iran’s Newspapers

Citizenship rights with political, civic and social dimensions are the fundamental elements of democracy and political development. This research has been done with aim of critical reappraisal of newspapers contents in Iran about human rights. In this study, Shargh and Keyhan are two case studies belong to reformist and conservatives as to important streamline in Iran. The methodology is quantitative content analysis. The main questions are: how and how much have been the performance of these newspapers in pay attention to and informing of audience to cognitive and practical- objective indexes of human rights? By the means, what are the viewpoints of elites about this performance of newspapers? The main findings of this study follow that: these newspapers have not done their role well and preferable in promotion of human rights due to the reasons such as: fractional and political dependencies, intellectual and financial dependency, none transparency, censorship, unfairness in speech, false and politicized analyses and informing functions and neglecting of professional ethics in journalism and then, have been faced to legitimacy crisis and challenges in views of public opinions and peoples.