Abstract

This study explains, from a discursive approach, how the Iranian revolution of 1979 was constructed by the BBC (Persian Service) as news story, and how this constructed story as a text provided the Iranian audiences, who participated in the revolution, with a' preferred reading' of the events. The study gives a media narrative of the revolution as a historical "context", and deals with the BBC as a "sender" in terms of its mythic reputation for "impartiality" and "objectivity" in representing the world events as news. The way in which the BBC as a Western broadcaster mediated in the highly anti-Western context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 is the core question that the study attempts to explore. It does so by analyzing the BBC news-discourse based on a narrative model and by showing the process through which the BBC "message" was encoded and decoded as a text. One conclusion of this thesis is that the BBC broadcasts to Iran cultivated in the audiences an image of the revolution different from what was cultivated by the most Western media, at the time, in their domestic or international audiences.