Critical Discourse Analysis of Representation of Iran in Asharq Al-Awsat Based on Van Leeuwen’s Theories

The present article seeks to analyze the contents of an Arabic newspaper based on the linguistic principles of text and discourse. The importance and necessity of this work is that it explains and reveals the linguistic techniques that journalists use to engage in media warfare against a country. Since Iran is a regional power in the Middle East, the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat was selected from a country with an opposing discourse, namely Saudi Arabia, to show the various forms of use of ideology in the press. Asharq Al-Awsat has the important feature (important to this study) of writing ideological news against Iran. So the texts studied in this article are deliberately selected from a newspaper whose hostility to Iran is clear, despite claims of neutrality. The reason for this choice is to be able to perform a precise analysis of a discourse against Iran. The purpose of the article is to analyze the semantic discourse constructs of Asharq Al-Awsat with the aim of explaining the representational patterns in it. To do so, the critical discourse analysis model of Theo Van Leeuwen is used, which discusses representation in political texts, and the selected texts are examined qualitatively. According to Van Leeuwen’s theories — according to, for instance, what he calls role allocation — several factors show the ideological interferences of the authors with the discourse structures of the text. In many case, this newspaper, through various textual and linguistic strategies such as identification and classification, represents Iran as an influential actor with negative performance. In all such cases, on the contrary, the authors have represented Saudi Arabia positively. Thus, the article argues that the primary strategy of the text on which its structural discourses are based is to portray the negative and interfering role of Iran in opposition to the positive activism of Saudi Arabia.