Media Bias: A Corpus-based Linguistic Analysis of Online Iranian Coverage of the Syrian Revolution

Abstract

This study explores the influence of a government’s ideology on linguistic representation in a news agency that characterizes itself as independent. It focuses on the coverage of the Syrian civil war as reported by the Iranian news agency Fars, addressing the discursive constructions of anti-government powers in relevant online reports released between 2013 and 2015. Since the Islamic Republic of Iran was a major regional ally of the Syrian government, we questioned the extent to which ideological independence could be expected during a politically critical time frame. Taking a corpus-based linguistic approach, the study explores the semantic macrostructures representing the opposition as well as the lexical clusters and keywords characterizing the news discourse. The findings indicate that Fars’ representation of the Syrian Revolution was, to some extent, biased, despite its claimed independence of the government’s political stance. It excluded the Sunni social actors, suppressed the Islamic faction identity of the rebels and depicted the uprising as a war against foreign-backed militants. The rebels were stereotyped in terms of terrorism and non-Syrians. In addition, the analysis reveals Fars’ tendency to emphasize the power of the government, depicting it as the defender of the Arab land and foregrounding the discourse of international conspiracy against Syria. The results of this work project the dimension of media bias caused by the underpinning political perspective of media institutions.

Keywords

• news agency
• corpus linguistics
• keyword analysis
• lexical clusters
• semantic macrostructures