842453
research-article2019
DCM0010.1177/1750481319842453Discourse & CommunicationMakki
Article
‘Discursive news values
analysis’ of Iranian crime
news reports: Perspectives
from the culture
Discourse & Communication
2019, Vol. 13(4) 437­–460
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481319842453
DOI: 10.1177/1750481319842453
journals.sagepub.com/home/dcm
Mohammad Makki
University of New South Wales, Australia; University of Wollongong, Australia
Abstract
This article is concerned with ‘how’ newsworthiness is constructed linguistically/discursively in
a sample of Iranian crime and misbehaviour reports. This is new as both linguistic analysis of
‘crime reports’ and the context of ‘Iranian journalism’ are among under-researched areas. Onemonth worth editions of two Iranian/Farsi language newspapers were collected, and the data
were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively with reference to the analytical framework of
Bednarek and Caple. While the quantitative analysis showed the construction of Eliteness as the
most frequent news value in both newspapers, there were differences in the construction of news
values between the newspapers. Qualitative analysis of the data also showed the construction of
news values in line with the sociocultural values prevalent in the society as well as the possible
role of state and political authorities.
Keywords
Crime reports, discourse analysis, DNVA, Iranian journalism, news values, sociocultural, crime
Introduction
This article is concerned with the notion of newsworthiness and how it is constructed in
Iranian/Farsi language crime news reports with reference to the emerging body of work
on discursive news values analysis (DNVA) from Bednarek and Caple (2017). In a way,
this article attempts to answer the call from Bednarek and Caple (2017) to investigate
this linguistic/discursive framework (DNVA) in ‘other’ languages and cultures so as to
enable a fuller cross-cultural comparison going beyond English language publications
Corresponding author:
Mohammad Makki, Faculty of Social Sciences, School of Education, Level 3 Building 67 McKinnon Building,
University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia.
Emails: momaki1986@gmail.com; mmakki@uow.edu.au
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Discourse & Communication 13(4)
(p. 237). It can be said that this article is novel in two ways: first, it provides some discursive analysis of crime and misbehaviour reports which have not generally received
much attention in discourse analysis studies, except for a very few studies within critical
discourse analysis (CDA) (Catalano, 2014; Machin and Mayr, 2012); second, it attempts
to shed some light on the application of the newly developed DNVA to the Iranian context and to the Persian/Farsi language newspapers.
Crime and misbehaviour news reports have been chosen as a typical form of news,
that is, they mainly contain the ‘basic news value’ of Negativity1 (Bell, 1991: 156); they
form the ‘essence’ of news journalism, as crime and misbehaviour is among the subject
areas which has been at the heart of news journalism since it emerged in its modern form
in the early 17th century (Conboy, 2004). There have been numerous studies on the representation of crime, criminals and crime fighting in sociology, criminology and media
studies (see classical studies of Chibnall, 1977; Cohen, 1972; Hall et al., 1978; Reiner,
2007; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994; Young, 1971). There have also been studies which
focused on the seriousness of the offence and its relationship to the cultural typification
of victims and criminals as the criteria to be covered in the media (Chermak and
Chapman, 2007), and there are studies which focus on the representation of the police
force in the media, which even sometimes exaggerate police effectiveness (see Innes,
1999; Reiner, 2010).
On the other hand, Iran, with its unique sociopolitical context in which the state
supposedly heavily controls the media and its institutions, has always been an interesting case for research (see Faris and Rahimi, 2015; Khiabany, 2010; Khosravinik, 2015;
Shahidi, 2007). Iran, like other Islamic countries, favours the ‘Maslahah principle’ –
what is good for the society – as journalists are expected to report on events that have
positive values for the society and humanity (Muchtar et al., 2017; Steele, 2013).
Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has always recommended journalists to
‘report good, positive and hopeful news’ (Iranian Students’ News Agency [ISNA],
1999). Thus, it would be interesting to find out how crime and misbehaviour news
reports, with the inherent feature of Negativity as their prerequisite, will be reported in
Iranian newspaper journalism. It is a country where the media generally operate under
strict screening and supervisory procedures, and defiant media will be closed down
with little compromise (Khiabany, 2010; Shahidi, 2007). Given this status of media
and newspapers in Iran, it will be interesting to find out if ‘the potential news value of
events depends on a given sociocultural system that assigns them value’ (Bednarek and
Caple, 2017: 51). To be more precise, this research will investigate the construction of
news values in the Iranian context to see if the Iranian/Islamic media system has
affected the coverage of crime news reports.
So far, the bulk of discourse analysis studies of the Iranian journalistic context has
centred on the representation of Iran’s contentious nuclear issue in the Iranian, US and
British publications through the lens of CDA (Behnam and Zenouz, 2008; Izadi and
Saghaye-Biria, 2007; Khosravinik, 2015; Koosha and Shams, 2005; Rasti and Sahragard,
2012). There is also a growing body of research attending to the structural properties of
Iranian Persian news texts in general and crime news reports in particular (Makki and
White, 2018; Rafiee et al., 2018; White and Makki, 2016).
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439
However, how news values are constructed in published crime news reports with
reference to the linguistic resources available has not yet been explored in a study of the
Iranian context and in Farsi/Persian language newspapers. This article examines the
types of news values and how they are construed2 and if Persian/Farsi language of the
newspaper might construe news values differently from what has been already discussed
in the literature on English language news reporting (Bednarek, 2015, 2016; Bednarek
and Caple, 2014, 2017). In other words, the focus is on the extent to which the ‘sociocultural’ Iranian context will affect the discursive mechanism of news values in a news
report (Bednarek and Caple, 2017; Parks, 2018).
News values: A brief overview
The notion of ‘newsworthiness’ or what journalists assessed to be worthy of coverage as
news is discussed and critiqued extensively in the literature (for a thorough review of the
newsworthiness literature, consult Caple, 2018; Caple and Bednarek, 2013). This notion
has become popular in journalism studies since the first systematic categorization of
news values or ‘factors’ by Galtung and Ruge (1965). Following their seminal study,
various approaches emerged in journalism literature ranging widely from instinct and gut
feelings, through selection criteria, to being intrinsic/inherent in events (Harcup and
O’Neill, 2017; O’Neill and Harcup, 2009; Schultz, 2007).
Even though linguists and discourse analysts have generally shown little interest in an
in-depth analysis of news values, probably because of its perceived irrelevance to the
linguistic analysis, there have been a few exceptions (Bednarek and Caple, 2012, 2017;
Bell, 1991; Cotter, 2010; Fowler, 1991; Richardson, 2007; Van Dijk, 1988, 1998).
Broadly speaking, four dimensions or perspectives are discussed on the analysis of news
values: material, cognitive, social and discursive.
In the material dimension, an event, itself, holds potential news value for a given community, and hence news values are intrinsic/inherent to the event and exist independently
of the journalist. This dimension mainly ignores the role of sociocultural and political
factors as they are not perceived to influence news values. In the cognitive dimension,
news workers and audience members have beliefs about news values and newsworthiness (see Fowler, 1991; Van Dijk, 1988). Based on this perspective, ‘news values reflect
economic, social and ideological values in the discourse reproduction of society through
the media’ (Van Dijk, 1988: 120–121), but they are all controlled by cognitive constraints. Fowler’s (1991) own cognitive conceptualization of news values is ‘socially
constructed’, and hence he recognizes the ‘social’ dimension of news values too (p. 15).
In the social dimension, news values are applied as selection criteria in journalistic routines and practices. News workers apply news values as criteria in what events to publish
and how to publish them. However, in this approach, the mediating role of practitioner/
journalist has been ignored and their role has been downplayed to just applying the ‘news
values’ as if they are ready-made. Instead, news values can/should be constructed in the
news text by the journalist who has a profound knowledge of the practice and the culture
(Bell, 1991; Cotter, 2010).
While different aspects of news values such as material, social or cognitive were
highlighted in the earlier research, there is an issue which has been largely ignored in
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almost all of these studies – the role of language in the construction of news values. From
this perspective, news values are viewed as being constructed discursively through language and other semiotic modes (such as visual modes and pictures). This approach is
known as DNVA (Bednarek and Caple, 2017) and has been taken up in a large number
of studies (e.g. Bednarek, 2016; Bednarek and Caple, 2012, 2014, 2017; Caple and
Bednarek, 2016). The main point of DNVA is the close analysis of linguistic elements in
the construction of news values in a news report, that is, how news values are constructed
via semiotic modes of text and image (more on this in the next section). While there is a
growing body of work examining English language news (Dahl and Fløttum, 2017;
Molek-Kozakowska, 2017), DNVA has not been examined in many different cultural
contexts, except for Chinese (Huan, 2016) and Italian (Fruttaldo and Venuti, 2017). It
will be interesting to explore the application of DNVA in a non-Western, Middle Eastern
context, like Iran.
Analytical framework
The ‘discursive’ approach to news values was developed in the early 2010s and has been
more fully developed in Bednarek and Caple (2017). This approach mainly focuses on
‘how’ rather than ‘why’ news values are ‘constructed’ or ‘construed’ in news texts. One
of the most important and distinguishing points for Bednarek and Caple, which I also
follow in this study, is the ‘construction’ of news values in a news report – value that is
‘socioculturally assigned’, rather than [being] ‘natural’ or ‘inherent’ in the news reports
(Bednarek and Caple, 2017: 51). Another important issue is how newsworthiness is constructed through linguistic and visual resources. In this study, the focus remains only on
the linguistic aspects due to space restrictions. For example, Negativity together with
Positivity may be constructed through the use of Attitudinal3 language (Martin and
White, 2005), among other ways. Negativity and Positivity are both described as news
values for Bednarek and Caple; as Feez et al. (2008) and White (1997) note, newsworthiness is about reporting both ‘destabilizing’ and ‘stabilizing’ events. Table 1 lists the news
values with their linguistic resources, taken from the crime data of this study, adapted
from Bednarek and Caple (2017).
In selecting the news values labels, Bednarek and Caple (2017) choose not to reinvent the wheel, but rather include those that resonate most frequently among the established literature, and use labels that are ‘the most transparent and least ambiguous’ (pp.
53–55). However, what is new is the discursive manifestation of such values in the published news stories, and how they are linguistically constructed in the news reports. This
article attempts to investigate the application of this linguistic inventory on a sample of
Iranian Farsi language crime reports from two ideologically different news dailies.
Specifically, it will be shown how each news value is constructed and what news values
are more frequently construed in Iranian crime news reports. While this is not necessarily
a quantitative study, numbers have been provided to give an idea about the possible frequency of each news value. More importantly, the linguistic functioning of the Iranian
crime news reports is analysed to find out how each news value is construed. The role of
sociocultural factors is examined to see if they have any effect on the construction of
news values in the Iranian crime corpus.
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Makki
Table 1. News values and linguistic resources.
News values
Definitions and linguistic manifestations
Consonance
Event is discursively constructed as stereotypical through words
and expressions (e.g. similarity with past: once again, just like before,
previously … too)
Event is discursively constructed as of high status and can include
people, countries, institutions and so on (e.g. use of status markers
and role labels: Colonel Mohammadi, the judge, Tehran’s prosecutor)
Event is discursively constructed as having significant effects or
consequences (e.g. descriptions of the consequences or effects of the
event: leaves 10s of deaths)
Event is discursively constructed as negative or positive (e.g.
references to positive/negative emotions and behaviours as well as
positive and negative lexis: ruthless, paedophile, murderer or forgiveness,
mercy, skilful operation)
Event is discursively constructed as having a personal or ‘human’
face (e.g. reference to ordinary, non-elite people, their emotions and
descriptions of their appearances: Ali, Masoumeh, 8-year-old Atila, the
tall, young boy)
Event is discursively constructed as geographically or culturally
near (e.g. explicit references to places near the target audience,
references to places via deictics, cultural references: Tehran, Shiraz,
here, this city, this country, Nowruz)
Event is discursively constructed as being of high intensity or large
scope (e.g. comparisons, quantifiers, intensifiers: more than …,
hundreds of, 38 people were killed)
Event is discursively constructed as timely, new, ongoing, current
to the immediate situation (e.g. use of temporal reference, use of
present and present perfect: today, yesterday, immediately, is available)
Event is discursively constructed as unexpected, unusual, strange,
rare (e.g. evaluations of unexpectedness, unusual happenings:
surprising, suddenly, the girl survived the exorcism practice)
Eliteness
Impact
Negativity/Positivity
Personalization
Proximity
Superlativeness
Timeliness
Unexpectedness
The newspapers and their sociopolitical context
Two Iranian Persian language newspapers from different political spectrums were
selected for this study, namely, Kayhan (meaning Galaxy) and Etemaad (meaning Trust).
These newspapers are widely read throughout the country and have had a relatively stable history of publication. While possible differences according to political/ideological
orientation were not a central concern of this article, nevertheless, it was felt wise to
include data from newspapers representing this ideological range, just in case significant
differences between these two newspapers did emerge.
Kayhan is a media organization which has publications in different languages such as
Persian, French, English and Arabic. Kayhan newspaper was originally founded by Mostafa
Mesbahzadeh, a former senate member in 1942. It was considered to be one of the ‘Twin
Giants’ with Ettela’at (meaning ‘information’) before the Islamic Revolution in 1979
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(Shahidi, 2007: 3) and among the ‘big four’ after the Islamic Revolution (Khiabany, 2010).
The status, objectives, policies and even the editorial team of the newspaper have undergone fundamental changes in the passage of time and especially before and after the Islamic
Revolution. After the Islamic Revolution, it underwent screening procedures in which 30
journalists of the newspaper were expelled and the newspaper came officially under the
control of the Islamic Association (Shahidi, 2007: 38). Kayhan is typically seen as a conservative newspaper which supports Sharia laws and a political theocratic system to the
extent that it is ‘in favour of total Islamization of public and private life in Iran, bringing all
aspects of public life under Shari’a’ (Khiabany, 2010: 38). It is considered a ‘flagship paper
for radical conservative voices in the Islamic Republic of Iran … and promotes discourses
of anti-American/anti-Westernism and political Islam’ (Khosravinik, 2015: 140). According
to Khiabany, Kayhan is against any liberalization policy and supports the intervention of
state in the economy. In terms of government funding and subsidies, it was revealed that
during 1989 to 2003, the government had provided the total sum of 368 million dollars
cash to press, 107 million dollars of which went to only Kayhan (Shahidi, 2007: 78).
Kayhan, undoubtedly, is one of the most important (if not the most) Iranian news dailies
with its long history of publication and its alleged affiliation with the Supreme Leader. It
has also been at the centre of attention in a number of other publications and discourse
analysis studies (see Khosravinik, 2015; Shahidi, 2007).
Etemaad, on the other hand, is a relatively newer publication with its affiliation to the
Reformists. The Reformists, or liberals, who arose after Hojatol Eslam Mohammad
Khatami took the presidential office in 1997, started a movement called the ‘Reform
Movement’ between 1997 and 2005. They mainly support the freedom of press and liberalization of the economy and negotiations with the West (see Semati, 2008; Shahidi,
2007). Etemaad is typically seen as a liberal newspaper supporting reforms and dialogues
with the West. It is considered the oldest Reformist newspaper in Iran which was founded
in 2002 by a member of National Trust Party, Elyas Hazrati, who is still the managing
editor. It was founded at a time of turmoil and suppression of the press. Etemaad has been
banned from publication twice by the Press Supervisory Council and the Judiciary System,
once in March 2010 on publication of a story of police attacking Tehran University after
the 2009 contentious presidential election. After its re-publication, it was banned again for
unknown reasons on 20 November 2011, which lasted for 2 months. One reason for
choosing this newspaper is that, despite these closures, it has had a reasonably stable history of publication, at least relative to other reformist newspapers; second was the availability of all its materials online and in the exact print layout. This made the process of
data collection easier and more convenient.
Despite possible ideological and political differences between the two newspapers,
they should follow the same specific rules and regulations to be able to continue publishing. For example, as Bahrampour (2004) outlines, post-revolutionary Islamic government believed that media practices are not the right of every individual but the authorized
ones, and hence supervision and control of the press is a requirement in this context.
Data collection procedures and analysis
Data used in this study were the crime and misbehaviour reports published in Etemaad
and Kayhan, over a period of 1 month, from 31 October 2013 to 30 November 2013.
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Table 2. The number of local and overseas crime reports in the newspapers with the total
number of words in parenthesis.
Etemaad
Kayhan
Local crime reports
Overseas crime reports
110 (42,944)
38 (9411)
17 (2325)
19 (3113)
Reports of crime and misbehaviour referred to all news reports of murder, theft, extortion, robbery, kidnapping, swindling and so on. This is related to what White (1997)
terms ‘normative breach’ – that is, where there is human behaviour which breaches legal
or ethical norms (p. 3). Crime and misbehaviour reports of the whole month, mainly
published in the police rounds section, were collected. To achieve this, all 30 editions (to
be exact 26 as the newspapers would not be published on the weekends and public holidays) were investigated carefully to cull out the crime news reports published in the
newspapers. Not only the news items published in the police rounds section had to be
collected but also other sections of the newspaper had to be examined to check whether
there was any crime report published elsewhere. This fact – that is, the place, page, exact
space, colour and font – could also contribute to how a news item was construed as newsworthy (Bednarek and Caple, 2012; Bell, 1991), but this element was not brought to the
news values analysis. The main focus of this article should remain on the ‘linguistic
properties’ of the texts and in Bednarek’s (personal communication) terms, on the ‘meaning-potential of published texts’. The emphasis remained on the collection of only ‘news
reports’ of the two newspapers which is generally assumed to be the most ‘objective’
news genre (see Mindich, 1998). Two ideologically opposing newspapers were selected
to provide a better and comprehensive array of Iranian newspaper journalism so that the
element of bias in the newspaper’s selection of news reports can be ruled out. All local
and overseas crime and misbehaviour news reports were collected, and the total number
of words in each section was also calculated within Microsoft Word (Table 2).
Having collected and counted all crime reports and the words, the inventory of linguistic devices outlined earlier (Table 1) was applied to the reports based on the co-text
and the cultural context. Due to the original Persian-Farsi language4 of news reports, the
researcher was not able to use the UAM Corpus (O’Donnell, 2015) or any other tool to
code the data; instead, the coding was done manually and from the news reports on the
Microsoft Word directly. The unit of coding for analysis was counting of news values per
occurrence/instance; this means that if the lexical item was repeated in the headline and
lead, it was counted twice or any number of times it occurred in the news text. Then, all
news reports were coded for each news value in turn. This study started with Consonance
and all news reports were coded, and then with Eliteness and all reports, and this went on
for each news value. This focus on one news value at a time allows for a more focused,
systematic and consistent analysis (Bednarek, 2015). While the author is responsible for
coding the data, he consulted with various academics in cases of ambiguity, over a long
period of time (during the completion of the PhD from which this article is one part of).
So, the data were re-coded multiple times to ensure intra-coder reliability. Inter-coder
agreement might not be the optimum for this research as ‘it would not have reduced the
“subjectivity” of the coding per se’ (Bednarek, 2015: 6). Instead, the focus is on ensuring
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that coding is consistent and transparent, and can be justified with an argument. In analysing the data, a few caveats should be noted. First, the category of Negativity was
excluded in the analysis as not only it has been ‘the basic news value’ (Bell, 1991) but
also it is unmanageable to keep track of all Negativity instances in crime and misbehaviour reports because there are numerous instances of ‘kill’, ‘murder’, ‘steal’, ‘rape’,
‘criminal’ and other negative lexis and events. In other words, the news value of
Negativity was predetermined in the corpus design. Finding out that Negativity is constructed is neither surprising nor is it independent from the criteria used to collect the
data in the first place. Second, all cities named in the reports were counted as Proximity
as construction of this news value would mainly depend on the target audience, possibly
encompassing the whole population in Iran; this is a nationally circulated newspaper
with even a wider reach via the Internet for Iranians living abroad. For the analysis of the
news report, first the headline and lead and then the body of the news report were coded,
and as noted, each instance/occurrence was counted. Then, due to the large difference
between the size of Etemaad’s and Kayhan’s crime reports, raw frequency numbers were
normalized per 10,000 words to neutralize the significant difference in the number of
crime and misbehaviour reports between the newspapers. It is common to normalize raw
frequencies to a common base (10,000 words for small corpora and 1,000,000 for large
corpora) when comparing corpora of markedly different sizes (McEnery et al., 2006).
Results and quantitative findings
The tables 3 and 4 below show the normalized frequency of constructed news values in
both newspapers and in both local and overseas events. However, this difference is not
the focal point of this article as it is not a comparative study between the newspapers.
Rather, the intention is to provide some perspectives into the concept of newsworthiness
in Iranian crime news reports.
The normalized frequency of constructed news values in the Iranian newspapers
Etemaad and Kayhan shows that Eliteness, Timeliness, Proximity, Personalization and
Positivity are the most frequently constructed news values in Etemaad’s local crime and
misbehaviour reports, respectively, while Eliteness, Proximity, Positivity and Timeliness
are the most frequently constructed ones in Kayhan’s. This high occurrence of Positivity in
both newspapers shows the focus of crime reports on the ‘detention’ of criminals and ‘restoration of order’ (Feez et al., 2008; White, 1997), and mostly positive assessments of the
police force, Judiciary System and similar authorities. Most of the news values (Eliteness,
Positivity, Proximity, Superlativeness and Timeliness) have been constructed more in
Kayhan than in Etemaad, while Consonance, Personalization and Unexpectedness have
been constructed fairly equal between the newspapers (e.g. 12 and 11 for Consonance).
The analysis of overseas news reports shows that Eliteness, Proximity and Timeliness
are the most frequent news values for Etemaad, while Personalization and Positivity are
added to the previous three as the most frequent news values in Kayhan. Interestingly,
while there are a few instances of Unexpectedness constructed in Etemaad’s local events
through assessments of unexpectedness, there is none in overseas reports. Kayhan,
though, covered a few overseas events which construed Unexpectedness such as ‘police
raiding an exorcism practice’.
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Overall, Eliteness seems to be the most frequently constructed news value in the
newspapers for both local and overseas events. Also, Positivity seems to have been constructed significantly more in Kayhan’s coverage of events than in Etemaad’s. On the
other hand, Impact was construed more in Etemaad than in Kayhan, in both local and
overseas events. Also, Timeliness, Superlativeness and Proximity have been construed
more in Etemaad’s overseas reports than in Kayhan’s while the case was totally opposite
in local events.
Qualitative analysis of the crime reports
The analysis of a month worth of crime reports demonstrated the construction of all the
above-mentioned news values through various linguistic resources. There were also linguistic cues which could construe different news values, in line with the sociocultural
expectations, from what is normally expected (Bednarek and Caple, 2017; Parks, 2018).
For example, there are terms and expressions in the crime reports which totally neutralize the negativity of the news report and also, to some extent, make it positive (e.g. ‘be
martyred’ instead of ‘be killed’ for police force). These religious terms can also construe
other news values such as Eliteness when they refer to important rituals (see ‘Eliteness’
section). There are also examples in which more than one news value has been construed
(e.g. Impact and Superlativeness). Other news values have been constructed through
various linguistic devices which appear mainly to be influenced by the Iranian/Islamic
sociocultural context.
Consonance
This news value was constructed mainly through references to general knowledge and
stereotypes held by the society about specific groups, people and populations, as well as
some suggestions to the similarities with past. The latter issue is relevant to the data
when similar and earlier cases of misconduct from the criminal have been outlined. So,
stereotypes of criminals as ‘re-offenders’ or perpetrators who keep offending will most
likely construct Consonance in the sample of data. Words and expressions used show the
previous negative record of the perpetrator in terms of stealing, robbery and earlier history of imprisonment (Figure 1).
The highlighted part in example 1 conforms to the stereotypical belief that Iranians
are so emotional (at least commonly held among Iranians), especially at times of grieving and sadness (Good and Good, 1988). The report takes note of this part as it encourages the police force to try and detain the culprit as soon as they can in order to alleviate
the pain of people. The second and third examples, which are more typical of Consonance
in the Iranian context, refer to the similar record of thefts by the perpetrator in which he
was detained a year ago. These examples are plentiful in the data in which the criminal
has previous record of theft, larceny, violence and extortion, and the criminal seems to
be a jailbird. References to the previous record might function to distance the reader
from the criminal and will be likely to construct the criminal as an ‘other’, outsider or
different members of society. These criminals are shown as ‘repeat offenders’ or ‘career
criminals’, and hence the news reports appear to construe Consonance with outlining
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Figure 1. Examples of Consonance in the corpus.5
similarity with the past, ‘a year ago … too’, ‘has a previous record of …’, as if these
criminals are re-offending and there is little or no reforming this kind of person. There
is a famous saying/stereotype for these criminals in the society: ‘you may end them but
you will not mend them’.
Eliteness
This is one of the most frequently constructed news values in the corpus. Eliteness is
constructed in most of the crime reports through the presence of a police authority of
some rank as well as occasional references to courts, judges, lawyers and prosecutors.
There have been also some news reports of high-status individuals being assassinated
and murdered. References to well-known rituals and sacred places and events are among
other devices for construing this news value. Also, in terms of overseas reports, there are
some news reports on riots and murders in high-status countries like the United States
and the United Kingdom (Figure 2).
The abundance of cases like example 4 and numerous references to courts, prosecutors, police officers, colonels and lawyers are typical of Iranian crime news reports. In
fact, individuals themselves are not generally known to the public, but the role labels
and their social status and ranks have made them elite individuals or places: ‘Judge
Asghar Abdollahi’, ‘Crime Court in Tehran’, ‘Zabol’s6 prosecutor’. Also, in example 6,
Muharram7 month, which is a sacred month for the Shiite, can be considered an example of Eliteness. There are other examples in which Tasua and Ashura8 have been discussed. These religious events are of very high status for all the Shiite community and
along with the Muharram month can be included as linguistic resources constructing
Eliteness in this dataset. One can also argue about the construction of Positivity with
‘forgave’ in example 6 as well as both Negativity/Positivity in example 5 through
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Figure 2. Examples of Eliteness in the corpus.
‘martyred’. This is an interesting case and will be discussed further in the ‘Negativity/
Positivity’section.
Impact
This news value has also been construed in a large number of crime reports, that is, events
which have significant consequences (e.g. large scope) affecting many people (Bednarek,
2015). Local events of crime and misadventure did not construct Impact very commonly as
the consequences of the actions of criminals were not typically large. Neither did the lexical items used construct any Impact through assessments of significance. However,
reported events from overseas did construct Impact as they covered events of terrorist
attacks in the neighbouring countries like Iraq and Syria as well as bombings in other parts
of the world. Example 7 presents the construction of Impact (Figure 3).
The shooting in the LAX Airport, Los Angeles, USA which has led to the death and
injury of eight people, is considered of high Impact. There are other examples of bombings in Iraq and Syria which have caused the death of a large number of people (40
deaths and 10s of injured), where Impact and Superlativeness have been both constructed
(see ‘Superlativeness’ section).
Negativity/Positivity
As discussed earlier, the news value of Negativity is excluded in the analysis as there is a
very large number of Negativity instances constructed discursively in each news reports,
that is, references to criminals and assessments of their behaviour (e.g. criminals, extorters,
murderer, paedophile, ruthless, mercilessly, violently) and points of impact in the reports
(bribery, extortion, armed robbery). On the other hand, the news value of Positivity is also
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Figure 3. An example of Impact in the corpus.
constructed in a large number of Iranian crime reports. Positivity is mainly constructed
through the ‘detention’, ‘capture’ and ‘arrest’ of the criminal by the police and generally
various positive assessments of the police authorities or the police force in general. Another
strand of crime reports construing Positivity focuses on ‘forgiveness’ and ‘mercy’ for the
killers/murderers through positive lexical terms and expressions.9 Positivity and focus on
detention sometimes take the angle of the news story, and the detention of the criminal has
been immediately discussed in the headline/lead nucleus (Figure 4).
Example 8, which is taken from the headline/lead nucleus, immediately discusses the
‘capture’ of fake police officers suggesting restabilization of the social order (White,
1997). This is very common, as numbers in Table 3 also showed in the previous section;
construction of Positivity is so frequent in the crime reports of both newspapers where
the social order seems to have been restored by the detention of the criminal. This seems
to ratify Feez et al. (2008) that newsworthiness is in essence about reporting both destabilizing (negative) and stabilizing (positive) events. In addition to this restoration of
order, almost always by the police force, other Positivity instances were construed
through positive assessments of the police and their actions, like examples 9 and 10, that
is, police officers have been deemed ‘cognizant’ or ‘dominance and power of police’ or
even indirect positive assessment of the police, ‘the detention only took 19 hours’ in
example 10 (Martin and White, 2005). Example 11, however, mainly discusses the forgiveness of the killer by the family members of the victim and hence takes a positive
angle towards the story, that is, focus is on the forgiveness rather than the crime, and this
has been constructed via positive terms such as ‘forgiveness’ and ‘respect for Muharram’.
Personalization
This news value is mainly about ‘giving a human face to the news through references to
ordinary people, their emotions, views, and experiences’ (Bednarek and Caple, 2017:
61). In the corpus of Iranian crime reports, while there are some examples in which an
ordinary pedestrian or an eyewitness is reporting on a crime they have observed, the
majority of Personalization instances were construed in the description of the criminal’s
or the victim’s age, appearance and sometimes occupation. When ‘ordinary citizens are
described as engaging in criminal behavior’, the news item can be coded as Personalization
(Bednarek, 2015: 11). In such examples, the criminal’s emotions and feelings might have
been described (Figure 5).
Makki
449
Figure 4. Examples of Positivity in the corpus.
The examples above all construe Personalization, 12 and 13 for the murderer and 14 for
the victim. In example 12, it is obvious that the individual is named and the report has also
refrained from using negative terms such as ‘killer’, ‘husband killer’ or even ‘the woman’.
One reason for this can be the sensitive nature of the news story; as Farzane has been the
subject of violence and harassment by her husband, she decided to kill her husband herself.
Based on the law, the retribution for such crimes in Iran is death by hanging; however,
construing Personalization by naming Farzane in the headline and in the story might want
to give a human face to the killer in the story, Farzane, suggesting that many other women
and potential readers in the country might be the subjects of violence and harassment in
their homes. Example 13, more or less, has also intended to give a human face to the individual [criminal] with describing his name and age (obviously very young) and the use of
negative Affect, ‘I did not want to kill anyone’, showing remorse on the part of the killer
(Martin and White, 2005). Example 14, on the other hand, has constructed Personalization
by naming the victim and providing his age (a child in fact).
Etemaad
Kayhan
Eliteness
107
148
Consonance
12
11
22
10
Impact
44
98
Positivity
58
51
Personalization
69
109
Proximity
Table 3. Normalized frequency of each instance of constructed news values in local events.
20
53
Superlativeness
79
90
Timeliness
3
1
Unexpectedness
450
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Makki
451
Figure 5. Examples of Personalization in the corpus.
Proximity
Proximity is conceptualized as concerning the construction of an event as happening ‘geographically’ or ‘culturally’ near the target audience (Bednarek and Caple,
2017). However, defining target audience and who they are can be problematic
especially for events covered in a national newspaper with such a wide coverage
and audience. So, as discussed earlier, every Iranian city named in the reports can
construct Proximity because readers from that city would feel more geographically
proximate to the event. There are also reports from criminals who had been stealing
in different cities and therefore are proximate with a larger number of readers. Also,
given the fact that the newspapers are both published in Tehran (the capital of Iran
with a population of around 15,000,000), there is more coverage of events from the
capital and Proximity will always be construed by the coverage of events in this city
(Figure 6).
The examples above all construct Proximity for some specific target audience, two of
them geographically and one culturally. Example 15 explains the detention of thieves
who were perpetrating in five large provinces, and hence people from those provinces
will feel proximate to them. Example 16, though, constructs Proximity for the inhabitants of a large and busy suburb in Tehran. Example 17, with reference to a cultural
aspect, ‘Shogam’, discusses a form of illegal murder retaliation, which is known to the
people of a southeast province in Iran. So, these examples also appear to corroborate the
nature of proximity and how it is better defined on a cline, more near or less near
(Bednarek and Caple, 2017: 63).
Superlativeness
The news value of Superlativeness has been mainly construed through ‘quantifiers’ in
the Iranian crime reports, both local and overseas. However, it seems that the threshold
level for overseas events is larger than that of local events. For example, if 10 victims
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Figure 6. Examples of Proximity in the corpus.
have construed Superlativeness for a local event, that number seems to be 20 or more for
overseas events, and especially in the events of terrorist attack, for instance. There are
also cases of ‘comparisons’ and ‘intensifiers’ in which Superlativeness has been constructed (Figure 7).
In examples 18 and 19, Superlativeness has been construed through large numbers
and this is the most common type of constructing this news value in the whole dataset;
‘39 martyrs and 25 injured’, in example 19, as also noted before, construes Impact as
well. This is a clear example of the co-occurrence of both Impact and Superlativeness in
the Iranian sample, just like what can be observed in English language publications (see
Bednarek and Caple, 2017: 60). Intensifiers, ‘significant amount of’ and comparisons,
‘more than …’ in examples 20 and 21 are the next recurring linguistic resources for the
construction of Superlativeness in the crime reports.
Timeliness
This news value is generally constructed via the present and present tense of the verbs,
and the application of lexical time references, both suggesting currency and urgency of
the event (Bednarek, 2016). In the Iranian corpus, there is another linguistic device and
that is the use of direct and indirect ‘imperatives’ with Observed Affect (White, 2012),
non-authorial affect, by police officers in order to warn the public about a perpetrator
Makki
453
Figure 7. Examples of Superlativeness in the corpus.
on the loose or encourage them to go to the police and file a report about a perpetrator
who seems to have preyed more victims than what is assumed (Figure 8).
In example 22, the present perfect tense (have not been detained) and the lexical item
(yet) construct Timeliness and the ongoing nature of the event. Examples 23 and 24 are
actually in the police’s voice, and not only the present tense construes Timeliness of the
event but also the direct or indirect imperatives of the police officer construct this news
value, that is, ‘it is recommended’, ‘plaintiffs … are invited to attend …’. These reports
are very common in the Iranian corpus, and the lexical terms such as ‘invite’, ‘ask’,
‘encourage’, which are requests made almost always by an elite police officer, suggest
Observed Affect from police authorities and function to construct Timeliness via the
lexical items and the imperative mode.
Unexpectedness
This news value was constructed discursively in a few instances in the corpus. In local
events, it was construed where there were assessments of police’s actions and in overseas
events, through unusual happenings and events. Before providing examples, a few caveats
about Unexpectedness in the crime events should be noted: first is the exclusion of events
such as ‘father killing son’ and ‘a taxi driver killing a 6-year old’, which can be so unusual
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Discourse & Communication 13(4)
Figure 8. Examples of Timeliness in the corpus.
due to the murder of a close family member or a child. However, then, most reports can be
taken to construe Unexpectedness as they mostly involve murder. So, the unusual events
counted and analysed in this study are mostly feel-good and ‘fancy-that’ stories in which a
person has been saved (Gillman, 2011). The other caveat in point is the stories about ‘forgiveness’ and ‘mercy’ for the killer/murder from the avengers of blood, close family members (see Note 9). These stories were not considered as Unexpectedness as it is not clear
whether forgiveness is rare in the Iranian culture to be considered unexpected. Instead, they
are deemed to construct Positivity discursively in the reports, as discussed earlier (Figure 9).
Example 25 provides an evaluation of unexpectedness, ‘surprising’, which is attributed to
the police force. There are a few other such assessments in the crime reports, that is, ‘suddenly’ and ‘unexpectedly’. The other example, 26, refers to an unusual happening which has
ended well. In fact, both ‘burying somebody alive and that person saving herself’ in the 21st
century is an unexpected event which can construe Unexpectedness for the target audience.
Concluding remarks
This article analysed how news values are discursively constructed in a corpus of Iranian/
Farsi language crime news reports, with Negativity being the prerequisite for the data
sample. While the frequency of each news value in the corpus data was normalized
Makki
455
Figure 9. Examples of Unexpectedness in the corpus.
(Tables 3 and 4), as the corpora were of different sizes, the main focus of the article was
on providing how each news value was constructed linguistically. Eliteness was the most
commonly constructed news value and Unexpectedness was the least commonly constructed one in the newspapers. This article, like earlier studies, found that Proximity
should be conceptualized on a cline as places can be considered only more or less near
the target audience (Bednarek, 2015; Bednarek and Caple, 2017). In addition, the sociocultural Iranian context seems to have influenced the linguistic choices made by the
newspapers. It was shown to have influenced the widespread presence of police authorities, which generally directed the angle of the news story towards the ‘restoration of the
order’ or ‘stabilizing the order’ or ‘solved crime’ (Chibnall, 1977; Feez et al., 2008). In
such reports, lexical items such as ‘detention’, ‘capture’, ‘bringing back to justice’, with
positive assessments of police officers and their behaviours, can be seen to construe the
news value of Positivity so frequently, being untypical of a crime news report. This is
even more obvious in the more religious, pro-Sharia newspaper, Kayhan, which is, following the Iranian Supreme Leader, inclined to cover positive and hopeful news (Muchtar
et al., 2017). Also, the Iranian journalism context has constructed a few news values differently from what is normally perceived in the literature (Bednarek, 2016; Bednarek and
Caple, 2017). The use of the lexical item ‘martyred’ instead of ‘killed’ for the police
force, an ideologically positive term for an Iranian Shiite audience, was an example.
Another recurring instance was the ‘forgiveness’ or ‘mercy’ of family members of the
victim towards the killer, leading to the construction of Positivity in the Iranian crime
reports. There was also another socioculturally distinctive element in the data, that is,
construction of Timeliness through the use of direct or indirect imperatives by a police
authority of high rank, suggesting the ongoing nature of the risk for the society.
This article made an effort to provide a ‘snapshot’ of DNVA in a corpus of Iranian/
Farsi language crime reports. More research is required into the linguistic properties of
news values in the Iranian context and in crime reports in general. Analysis of other
semiotic modes such as ‘photos’ or ‘visual imagery’ alongside the linguistic analysis can
Etemaad
Kayhan
Eliteness
236
186
Consonance
21
28
21
10
Impact
12
80
Positivity
43
109
Personalization
223
147
Proximity
Table 4. Normalized frequency of each instance of constructed news values in overseas events.
47
22
Superlativeness
193
77
Timeliness
0
16
Unexpectedness
456
Discourse & Communication 13(4)
Makki
457
provide useful insights into the journalism of other non-English contexts and cultures
(Dahl and Fløttum, 2017). Ideally, access to newsrooms and staff meetings and to the
underlying selection process of news reports will shed more light to the working of news
production (Huan, 2016). Last but not least, close attention to the role of sociopolitical
authorities and supervisory systems can provide a more comprehensive overview of the
news journalism practice.
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to Dr Helen Caple for her careful edits and comments on the early
draft of this paper. I would like to thank Associate Professor Monika Bednarek to answer all my
questions on the analysis of data patiently. Many thanks to Dr Peter RR White for his supervision
of my PhD, to which this paper is also related. I am solely responsible for any errors.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
All news values in discursive news values analysis’ (DNVA) terms have initial capital letters.
They might be used in the general meaning of the word without any specific capitalization:
Negativity versus negativity.
The terms ‘construct’ and ‘construe’ are used interchangeably in this article and refer to the
linguistic aspect of news values (Bednarek and Caple, 2017: 49).
Attitudinal language is concerned with emotional reactions [affect], evaluations of human
behaviour via social and ethical norms [Judgement] and assessment of things and actions
[appreciation]. For some important resources on Appraisal and Attitudinal language, see
Martin (2000), Martin and White (2005) and Bednarek (2006).
Persian/Farsi is a right to left language, and UAM Corpus cannot handle these languages yet
as the fonts will be distorted.
The parts which construct the news value have been underlined.
An Iranian city lying on the border with Afghanistan.
This is a month, which is very sacred for the Shiite due to the martyrdom of Imam Hussein
(third Imam of the Shiites).
The 9th and 10th days of the Muharram in which Imam Hussein was martyred and the Shiite
still mourn and observe these events in such dates.
Based on the law, if somebody kills another person, there is capital punishment unless the
avengers of blood (father, mother, son, etc.) forgive the killer.
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Author biography
Mohammad Makki received his PhD in Media from University of New South Wales, Sydney, in
2016. He is generally interested in analysing the discourse of media with reference to the ideological working of the society. He has worked on the discourse of Iranian Farsi language newspapers
with attention to news values, journalistic genres and writing styles. He has published two papers
from his PhD in Discourse, Context, & Media and Journal of World Languages. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate subjects in media, linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as Teaching
English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in University of New South Wales and
University of Wollongong.