Media Representation Theory and the Analysis of the Public Opinion of Americans and Iranians about each other

This research has as its objective the study of the media effects on public opinion when representing some of the events. It centers on the effect of news media on shaping the American and Iranian public opinion about each other. By surveying a small portion of this, it is almost possible to understand the degree of impressionability of each side from the mass media. It has been attempted to conduct a qualitative case study of a certain number of Iranians and Americans, mostly the educated ones, in order to comprehend their perceptions by using the theory of the effect of representation by the mass media on shaping public opinion. By representation it means that no media could be an impartial intermediary when depicting an event, since the media depends on language and meaning which are in their turn used within a discourse subject to power. Hence the representation done by the media, disregarding its being moral or not, has an ideological inclination and tends to sustain or undermine power and its pertinent discourse. The results show that Americans are more swayed by their media which usually offers a negative picture of Iran. Hence the development of direct interactions between these two domains – in scientific, research, … fields – can exert a stronger influence on American public opinion than the Iranian one.