Linguistic representation of ideological strategies in two Iranian newspapers written in English

The present study investigates ideological strategies mainly embodied in X-phemism in light of Van Dijk’s and Charteris-Black’s frameworks of the construction of reality in news reports. To this aim, a representative sample of 239 news reports was selected for a one-year period (end of January 2010 to end of January 2011) from two Iranian newspapers published in English—the Tehran Times and Kayhan International. A total of 11,938 strategies from 10,676 clauses in these newspapers were analyzed, both quantitatively in terms of frequency of occurrence for each strategy, and qualitatively for the reason of occurrence. Findings have revealed that both news outlets contain a wide range of ideological strategies, among which Objectivity with its sub-strategies, Negative and Positive Lexicalization as part of metaphor, and Exaggeration/Hyperbole were the most frequent whereas Counterfactuals, Openness/Honesty and Irony had the lowest frequencies. The quantitative and qualitative findings are discussed in the result and discussion sections.