Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of the Coronavirus news in the Iranian Press

Analyzing the content of the news and the way it is presented is very important since media can affect public opinion in so many ways. This study is aimed at analyzing the news coverage of the Covid 19 in Iranian written Press to find out about the differences between the ways different news media in Iran cover and report the news about Covid crisis during three time periods, from March to November 2020; and the lexical items that emerged or become frequent in the media after the crisis. The corpus has been built by crawling the websites of 6 main Iranian news media that are believed to be close to the three main political factions of Iran, namely Fundamentalists, Reformists, and Moderates from March to November 2020. The results show that “war” and to be specific, “Imposed War” or “holy defense” act as the nodal point in the discourse of “Corona War” in Iran. Words like sepah (corps), Basij, Jihad, fore front, health defenders, health martyrs, enemy, defeat, etc. are prominent in this discourse. Corona virus is represented as an inauspicious virus that can be used by the enemy against Iran, and Iran must defeat the enemy conspiracy. In this discourse, the words “America” and “Trump” are always very frequent. This representation of “Corona War” in Iran is more emphasized in Fundamentalists newspapers during the first time period in this research. Pre Corona, Post Corona, Corona phobia, are some of the neologisms in Persian after this pandemic.