A COMPARATIVE APPRAISAL STUDY OF ONLINE NEWS COVERAGE ON ANTI-GOVERNMENT PROTESTS IN IRAN IN JANUARY 2026 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND AL-JAZEERA ENGLISH
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31851/et6q2m37Keywords:
Evaluative Meaning, Political Protest Discourse, Media Ideology, International Journalism, Media FramingAbstract
This study investigates the appraisal resources of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation used by The New York Times and Al Jazeera English in reporting the January 2026 anti-government protests in Iran, and explains how these resources construct evaluative meanings about protesters, government authorities, and the political crisis. Using a qualitative descriptive discourse analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), the study analyzed six purposively selected online news articles (three from each outlet). Data were collected through document analysis, segmented into clauses, and coded across the three appraisal subsystems. The findings identified 303 appraisal instances in The New York Times and 240 in Al Jazeera English. Judgement was the most frequent resource in both corpora, followed by Appreciation, Heterogloss, and Force. The New York Times framed the crisis through humanitarian concerns, negative judgment of government actions, and affect emphasizing fear, whereas Al Jazeera English adopted a more balanced representation by relying on heteroglossic attribution to multiple institutional voices. This study extends Appraisal Theory to international political news discourse and offers insights into ideological positioning and cross-cultural news framing, contributing to discourse analysis, journalism, and critical media literacy.
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