نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities , Ayatollah Boroujerdi University
2
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science,, Faculty of Humanities, Ayatollah Borujerdi University
چکیده
This study looks into how some international news organizations established credibility through their headline coverage of the 12-day Iran-Israel conflict in June 2025. Using Van Leeuwen's (2007) legitimation paradigm, the study examines 35 headlines from major English-language media outlets, including Fox News and Reuters. This study employs qualitative discourse analysis to determine how headlines support or contradict military and political actions during the conflict by using mythopoesis, moral evaluation, authorization, and justification. The results show that while evaluative and emotionally charged word choices create moral narratives of threat, victimhood, and triumph, headlines often cite institutional and expert authority to justify political and military operations. While mythopoesis creates both positive and negative narratives, portraying players as either heroes or criminals, rationalization techniques are frequently instrumental or theoretical, connecting events causally to justify reactions or results. The study highlights the intricate interactions between language choices, ideological positioning, and media framing in modern conflict reporting and demonstrates how headline discourse is a strategic site for building legitimacy, influencing public perception, and mediating interpretations of geopolitical events. The findings indicate that rationalization and authorization are the most dominant legitimation strategies, reflecting the strong tendency of headline discourse to justify conflict-related actions through causal reasoning and appeals to institutional or expert authority. Moral evaluation is also frequently employed through evaluative lexical choices that construct polarized narratives of threat, victimhood, and legitimacy. In contrast, mythopoesis appears less frequently, suggesting that narrative-based legitimation is less central in short headline formats. Overall, the study concludes that headlines function as a strategic discursive site where legitimacy is actively produced and contested, shaping public perception by presenting political and military actions as reasonable, necessary, and morally defensible.
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