Evaluation in Media Discourse: Contrasts among Journalists in Reporting an Event

In news discourse, an area not really touched upon in research is examining the expression of opinions through language by the news writers. That is, how do news writers express their opinions about the events, people, and situations they report on? This study compares the news coverage of the airplane crash in Iran on January 11th 2011 by Iranian and foreign journalists extracted from online newspapers in order to reveal how differences in their viewpoints and opinions influence the way news is represented to the public. By adopting Bednarek's core evaluative parameter and Bell's news values taxonomy, the study examines the variations in the presentation of the same news story from the journalists’ perspective.