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Good Iranian, Bad Iranian: Representations of Iran and Iranians in Time and Newsweek (1998–2009)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Sam Fayyaz  and
Roozbeh Shirazi
Sam Fayyaz
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Roozbeh Shirazi
Affiliation:
Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development, University of Minnesota
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Abstract

This article analyzes the ways in which Iran and Iranians are represented in Western news media sources. Through detailed textual analysis of articles in Time and Newsweek between 1998 and 2009, it demonstrates that journalistic representations of Iran and Iranians are not simply efforts aimed at describing the real Iran, but rather form the basis of what Said refers to as a powerful “community of interpretation” that often reflects and reproduces certain xenophobic stereotypes of non-Western foreign subjects. While some shifts in Western media representations of Iranians have occurred in the thirty years since the revolution, the underlying ontological assumptions of these representations have remained remarkably durable. That is to say, the dominant representational discourse found in these newsmagazines depicts the political behavior of Iranians on the basis of essentialized notions of Persian and/or Islamic civilization, while very often emphasizing the taken for granted superiority of the West. Earlier Orientalist discourses focus on the difference of non-Western foreign subjects by denigrating them as fundamentally anti-modern and incapable of political, cultural and economic development without Western intervention. This article presents an unmistakable discursive pattern in American journalism whereby certain Iranians are incorporated into Western civilization by virtue of their embrace of a Western modernity.

Type
Iranian Diaspora Studies
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 53 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2013

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4 Our research data focused on content in the two magazines with the subject term “Iran” in the online database Academic Search Primer. Time yielded 287 results, while Newsweek yielded 222 results for a total sample size of 509 mostly full-length or brief articles, but also some interviews, one short biography and one “personal account” by a contributing journalist. The time span covered in our analysis includes almost the entire duration of Mohammad Khatami's tenure as president (1997–2005) and the first term of current President Mahmood Ahmadinejad (2005–2009), two political figures that have garnered vastly different general reactions from the American public and government. The time span also covers the period before and after 9/11, and ends with the protest movement that followed the contested 2009 presidential elections in Iran.

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