Ideological Representations in Media: A Study of the Media Coverage of the Developments of JCPOA after America’s Exist until Iran’s Final Steps in Reducing Its Commitments

The present research aims to explain the ideological biased representations of political developments in specific news media. This is a descriptive-analytic research, which analyzes the data with combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. To do so, two domestic media (the website of IRI News Network and Press TV) as representatives of the discourse of the Islamic Republic and two foreign media (the website of the Voice of America Persian News Network and English BBC) as representatives of the Western side in the period from the American exit from the JCPOA agreement to the final step by Iran in reducing its nuclear commitments. The data were analyzed by utilizing the theoretical principles of the critical discourse and the theoretical framework of Halliday in functional linguistics. The results of the linguistic study of the news titles in these media show that each discourse tries to blame the other side for the failure of JCPOA. This ideological approach is confirmed by a linguistic analysis of the news titles of the rival discourses. Moreover, on behalf of their relevant discourses, these media try to highlight their positive measures and attribute plausible features to their own discourse. In this way, they highlight certain acts and actors to marginalize others, and sometimes they give directions to their audiences with partial or biased information.