Transitivity Analysis of American and Iranian News Reports on the Murder of Qassem Suleimani and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

Abstract

This study investigates the representation of the murder of Qassem Suleimani and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis in two selected news agencies, using Halliday's transitivity (2004) and Van Leeuwen's role allocation (2008) as the assigned models for this study. The two selected newspapers are American (New York Times, Washington Post and Lose Angels Times) and Iranian (Tehran Times, Kayhan, and Iran News).  The study aims at scrutinizing micro strategies used in representing the event, unraveling hidden ideologies behind the representation, and how the main social actors (Suleimani and al-Muhandis) are represented, basing on ideology, and last, comparing the representation of the event between the two selected data in light of the model units. The results show that different manifestations of the event and the main social actors are advanced by the American and Iranian newspapers in response to ideology.