Analyzing the Role of Iranian Media’s Political affiliation on The Representation of the Government performance in the early outset of the Covid-19 Pandemic: Focusing on Fundamentalist and Reformist News Agencies

One of the common ideas for crisis communication is that the media consensus on the role of the government causes people to sympathize with the government and helps the government to control the crisis. In order to investigate the functioning of the media at the beginning of the crisis, the present article studies the role of political affiliation of Iranian news agencies in the representation of the government during the crisis of the Covid-19 Pandemic in the first seven months of the outbreak of this disease. For this purpose, a conceptual framework based on three models of the relationship between government and media, i.e. hegemony, propaganda, and Indexing has been set. Also, the qualitative approach and the inductive framework analysis method were used to analyze 794 news items that were selected from two news agencies affiliated with the reformists, namely IRNA and ILNA, and two news agencies affiliated with fundamentalists, namely Fars and Mehr. The findings, while showing the decreasing trend of production of corona virus related news in the studied period, show that all news agencies have used the frame of “criticizing the government, but unlike other news agencies, The results show that during the first Covid-19 wave, all news agencies acted based on the hegemonic model and they have agreed on important issues such as the manageability of the corona virus and the conditions caused by pandemic. But during the second wave, we see a lack of agreement between news agencies.