Towards (De-)legitimation Discursive Strategies in News Coverage of Egyptian Protest:VOA & Fars News in Focus

AbstractThis article aims at conducting a critical discourse analysis on discursive strategies of legitimation applied in VOA and Fars News, two news agencies with fundamentally distinctive ideologies, to represent the single event of Egyptian protest as a legitimized action and Hosni Mubarak's regime as the delegitimized other. In order to represent how these two news agencies employ the legitimation discursive strategies, including four main strategies of authorization, evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis to legitimize Egyptian revolution, Van Leeuwen's (2008) model of legitimation strategies was applied. This article also delves into how these two opposite news networks tried to delegitimize Mubarak's regime by using Van Leeuwen's legitimation strategies. The research will discuss how employing certain discursive strategies of language can be used for the purpose of brainwashing. The study shows that VOA emphasized mainly on delegitimizing Mubarak's regime, whereas Fars News put more emphasis on legitimizing Egyptian revolution than delegitimizing Hosni Mubarak's regime. As well this study investigates to what extent these two news agencies try to show Egyptian nation's revolution as an Islamic movement or economic movement. This article also investigates how the guidelines and interests of the news networks can affect their approach in using different legitimation strategies