The Shift in the American Press Discourse over Iran’s Nuclear Deal 2015. Case Study: New York Times and Washington Post 2015-current days

Abstract

Iran nuclear issue has been one of the most controversial topics in the international political arena since 1979. The anti-colonial and Islamic sentiments have immensely widened the gap between Iran and the west and, thus, fuelled and legitimised the Iranian revolutionary discourses when confronting the west. So this issue has gone under many political irresolution and disputes, and it has brought both Iran and US, in many occasions, to an extremely polarised context in which both sides project and maintain a legitimate position against the other, to the extent they have been on the verge of war recently (especially with the killing of Soleimani in 2019). By considering this very brief background to this issue, and based on Edward Said’s notion of orientalism and Hall’s mechanisms of the Self/Other representation, this study examines the American press discourse towards Iran in the period stretching between 2015 till 2020.The study tries, on one hand, to see whether the Orient (Iran) has still the same bad image, or it has been altered. On the other hand, the study then examines the discursive strategies used by the American press to legitimize the anti-Iranian actions, policies and discourses, as well as to de-legitimize the Iranian actions and discourses. Second, this research attempts to examine the ideological stance of the American press behind their linguistic forms towards Iran nuclear issue especially since Iran nuclear deal 2015. Third, the study attempts to re-address the issue of the complex mediation between discourse and social structure and find convincing answers to the question of how discourse shapes to influence the socio-political structures. For this aim, I take both New York Times and Washington Post as the source of my data of analysis in the period stretching from 2015 till current. The study focuses on the texts written in the periods after the Iran deal 2015-2016, and the period when Trump came to pull US out of the deal and put more sanctions on Iran again 2017-2020. Thus, 27 articles were selected from both the newspapers opinion.