Persian-Speaking Foreign Media’s Treatment of Israel/Palestine Question: A Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The study engages in a critical analysis of the Persian-language foreign media discourse on the Israel/Palestine question. The study employs the content analysis, as the main method, in an analysis that is informed, theoretically, by the agenda theory and critical analysis of the speech. This analysis is conducted with a view to identify the determinants of foreign media coverage in Persian language - represented by two news sources, the BBC Farsi and Radio Farda - and its contexts through examination of the lexical map and survey statistics extracted from the virtual sites of these media outlets. It also analyses techniques and terminology used to cover the relevant events. The study examines the objectives of these media outlets in their coverage, including identifying the image they try to present of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by analyzing news samples of the most relevant events during the sample time of the study i.e. May 2018. The analysis of the sample, in this study, does not support that Persian-language foreign media discourse is balanced and neutral in its treatment of the Israel/Palestine question, favoring one party at the expense of the other, the Palestinian, by relying on the sources of the Israeli dictionaries and lexicon as well as adopting the Israeli narrative in reciting the events. This bias can suggest the existence of an ideological/political framework in the media coverage, where they tend to produce, alsmost, only positive notions of one party to the conflict while adopting a different tendency towards the other