The role of ‘culture’ in the construction of news values: a discourse analysis of Iranian hard news reports

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper addresses ‘Positivity’ as a news value in a corpus of Iranian crime and misbehaviour reports. Crime reports, as the typical form of ‘negative’ news in Western news discourse analysis, have been chosen in order to find out if and how Positivity is constructed discursively in such reports. The context of ‘Iranian’ newspaper journalism and the field of ‘crime and misbehaviour’ are both among under-researched areas, especially from a discourse analysis perspective. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data showed that Positivity is constructed regularly in the Iranian crime corpus. Qualitative analysis of the crime reports showed that Positivity is constructed through the headline and lead to the rest of the news report and is usually construed via positive assessments of the police force and their actions. In addition, there are various terms referring to ‘forgiveness’ and ‘mercy’ which construe Positivity in such news reports. Generally, the abundance of Positivity in Iranian crime reports lends support to the proposition of this news value as a separate category. Also, its construction in the Iranian crime corpus seems to be highly influenced by the institutional power (i.e. police here) and the ‘cultural’ norms of the society.