A Comparative Analysis of Engagement Markers in Western vs. Iranian News Networks Representation of Iranian Nuclear Deal

News plays a crucial role as one of the vital needs of any society as every aspect of language in news discourse can be manipulated in a way that obfuscate the true realities in the minds of the public. This study is an attempt to utilize the engagement part of Appraisal framework proposed by Martin and White (2005) in order to shed light on the differences and similarities between political news discourses of news networks which belong to ideologically different political positions. To this purpose, a sample of totally 71 news stories on nuclear deal between Iran and 5+1 countries were retrieved from two international Iranian state-funded networks, i.e. Al alam and Press TV, as well as two Western, i.e. BBC and CNN news networks within a time span of a year after the agreement. The analysis procedure included manual codification and identification of the categories of dialogism of attribution within engagement scheme; namely, endorsement, source type, and textual integration. The results of the comparison across the corpus are presented both quantitatively (running Chi-square analysis) and qualitatively which demonstrate the comparative patterns in the use of engagement markers by the media representing different political positions with regard to the nuclear deal.