Personification and ideology in the American media coverage of the Iranian Green Revolution

Résumé

Research on metaphor has consistently proven that metaphors always involve a degree of perspectivation, where certain features are highlighted while others remain obscured (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 153). The awareness of this partial mapping is crucial for the construction and reproduction of ideology. Specifically, this study claims that the nation is a person metaphor plays a crucial role in the mass media coverage of conflicts. Through a thorough analysis of a corpus of 17 articles from The New York Times reporting on the Iranian Green Revolution (June 2009), this paper intends to unravel the extent to which both tropes allow the inclusion of the Iranian protesters into the Western "Friendly Us" while rejecting the Iranian government as an "Evil Them." This work is theoretically framed within critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black 2004), a fruitful intersection between critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk 2001) and conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The synthesis of the results shows evidence of the potentiality of metaphor as an essential resource in the construction and reproduction of ideological discourses in the news.