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Critical discourse analysis uncovers distinct ideological framing strategies across international news headlines on the Israel–Iran conflict, highlighting media influence on public opinion.
This study examines how online news headlines construct ideology and identity in reporting the Israel–Iran conflict. Integrating sociolinguistic perspectives with Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study investigates how language shapes public understandings of the conflict and its key actors. A qualitative analysis was conducted on a purposively selected corpus of 70 online news headlines published in 2024 by Western, Israeli, Iranian, Arab, and international news organisations. The analysis focuses on lexical choice, grammatical structure, presupposition, and agency. The findings reveal four dominant discursive strategies: aggressor–victim framing, lexical polarisation, presuppositional framing, and the strategic allocation of agency. These linguistic choices construct competing ideological narratives and social identities by presenting Israel and Iran in different ways across media systems. While many Western outlets tend to frame Israel within narratives of security and self-defence, Iranian and Arab media more often emphasise aggression, resistance, and regional power dynamics. Across all outlets, headlines selectively foreground certain aspects of events while backgrounding others, thereby shaping audience interpretations of legitimacy, responsibility, and identity. The study concludes that online news headlines are not neutral summaries but influential sociolinguistic and ideological texts that contribute to the construction of public opinion in the digital media environment.
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Agbo et al. (2026) studied this question.
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