A Discourse Analysis of American Political Articles Pertinent to Iran’s Atomic Issue Published Before and After the Geneva Accord (A CDA Approach)

Van Dijk (1993) believes that critical discourse analysis (CDA) seeks to find and reveal the role of discourse in producing power, abusing it, and finally creating the inequality which is seen as “negative effect of power”. This study aimed to investigate the effect of Geneva Accord on representation of Iranian and Western social actors involved in Iran’s atomic issue in five famous American newspapers based on one main category of Van Leeuwen model, inclusion, and its four morpho-syntactic categories of activation, passivation, personalization, and impersonalization. The results of the study showed that there was a shift in ways through which social actors were represented. However this shift was not deep and significant, the reasons behind any use of these strategies is not random but very intentional revealing too many creeping ideas. These ideas are not seen, and even felt, by the readers leading them to some specific and politically needed ideologies.