This thesis provides an account of key aspects of the “language” and the communicative functionality of Iranian print news journalism with reference to news items published in two of Iran’s leading Persian-Farsi language daily newspapers, Kayhan and Etemaad. One-month’s worth of police rounds items (crimes, accidents, natural disasters, and strange events) and four days of politics reports were collected. Analyses are provided with respect to three related aspects of these items: how the experiential domain of police rounds is construed in these two newspapers via assessments of “newsworthiness”; how these texts are organised structurally and the typical genres employed in these two journalistic domains; and the evaluative styles and the journalistic voices employed in the political reporting. The results of the analyses of police rounds reports suggest that while there is some overlap in the construal of the Field of police rounds between the newspapers in terms of which police rounds events their editors consider “newsworthy”, there are, nevertheless some important differences. The two newspapers appeared to operate under different systems of newsworthiness with regard to the relative weightings given to crime versus misadventure reporting, as well as the amount of coverage afforded local police rounds events as opposed to foreign/international police rounds events. The findings with regard to the structural arrangements and genre status of the texts showed both similarities and differences with what has been observed in English language news journalism and the journalisms of other languages. A significant number of the crime reports were found to incorporate extended chronologically-organised records of events and were found to bear a strong resemblance to “traditional” types of storytelling such as narrative and exemplum. A number of the politics reports were found to operate with a highly impersonalised style, a “journalistic voice” even more constrained evaluatively than the “reporter voice” style which has been associated with “objective” hard news reporting in other languages. It is proposed that at least some of these features may be explained by reference to the continued influence of political/religious authorities on media organisations in Iran.
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