Critical Discourse Analysis of Iranian Media Framing of the COVID-19 Pandemic through Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model

This mixed-methods study investigates how Iranian news media discursively framed the COVID-19 pandemic between 2019 and 2021, with the aim of uncovering the interplay between linguistic representation, discursive practice, and ideological reproduction. Grounded in Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and augmented by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the research analyzes a corpus of 100 news reports, headlines, and editorials from six major Iranian outlets: Kayhan, IRNA, Tasnim, Shargh, Etemad, and ISNA. The study adopts a sequential explanatory design: first, a qualitative inductive analysis identifies dominant discursive strategies (e.g., war/religious metaphors, passive constructions, intertextual appeals to authority); second, a quantitative coding scheme operationalizes these strategies to test three hypotheses regarding ideological convergence across outlet types. Results indicate statistically significant alignment in the use of unifying national-religious framing—particularly in modality distribution, metaphor frequency, and agency suppression—even across reformist and conservative platforms. The findings suggest that pandemic discourse in Iran functioned less as an arena of contestation and more as a coordinated apparatus of national meaning-making, legitimizing state authority through the naturalization of collective resilience. This study contributes to CDA literature by demonstrating how crisis discourse in ideologically saturated contexts can achieve discursive hegemony not through overt censorship, but through shared linguistic repertoires and recontextualized historical–religious narratives.