Iran and the American Media: Press Coverage of the ‘Iran Deal’ in Context

"Iran and the American Media examines many ways that media coverage has brought Iran so deeply within America’s political and cultural consciousness. For media entities this has been an often difficult process in terms of sustaining objectivity and reflecting complexity. These authors perform a valuable service by addressing a wide range of media-related topics about one of the most challenging international relations issues of recent decades."
— Philip Seib, Professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy, International Relations, University of Southern California, USA

"By closely examining the coverage of the so-called Iran Deal, the authors of this careful work skillfully reveal how the major US media's treatment of the agreement uncritically reproduce, rather than judiciously scrutinize, official and popular narratives that frame Iran as untrustworthy in negotiation, regionally malign, and hence deserving of discipline and punishment. Using information from thousands of news reports, the authors also convincingly show how, through their reliance on a limited set of domestic and foreign expert opinions, major news outlets perpetuate the notion that only a narrow range of policy choices is available to US policymakers."

— Farideh Farhi, Independent scholar, Comparative Politics, Iran’s Contemporary Politics and Foreign Policy, USA

This book investigates the American media coverage of the nuclear “Iran Deal” by examining the sources of news and opinion about it in The New York Times, The Washington Post and broadcast news. The empirical component uses media sociology and indexing theory to determine the extent to which the media covered the topic within a framework of debates among institutional sources. The coverage is placed within historical and interpretative frameworks that examine the construction of Iran in both the news and American popular culture to reveal the place Iran occupies in the American political and cultural imagination.

Mehdi Semati is Professor and Chair in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University, USA.

William P. Cassidy is Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University, USA.

Mehrnaz Khanjani is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, USA.