Legitimation Strategies in News Coverage of the Iran-Israel Conflict; the Case Study of ۱۲-Day War

This study looks into how some international news organizations established credibility through their headline coverage of the ۱۲-day Iran-Israel conflict in June ۲۰۲۵. Using Van Leeuwen's (۲۰۰۷) legitimation paradigm, the study examines ۳۵ headlines from major English-language media outlets, including Fox News and Reuters. This study employs qualitative discourse analysis to determine how headlines support or contradict military and political actions during the conflict by using mythopoesis, moral evaluation, authorization, and justification. The results show that while evaluative and emotionally charged word choices create moral narratives of threat, victimhood, and triumph, headlines often cite institutional and expert authority to justify political and military operations. While mythopoesis creates both positive and negative narratives, portraying players as either heroes or criminals, rationalization techniques are frequently instrumental or theoretical, connecting events causally to justify reactions or results. The study highlights the intricate interactions between language choices, ideological positioning, and media framing in modern conflict reporting and demonstrates how headline discourse is a strategic site for building legitimacy, influencing public perception, and mediating interpretations of geopolitical events. The findings indicate that rationalization and authorization are the most dominant legitimation strategies, reflecting the strong tendency of headline discourse to justify conflict-related actions through causal reasoning and appeals to institutional or expert authority. Moral evaluation is also frequently employed through evaluative lexical choices that construct polarized narratives of threat, victimhood, and legitimacy. In contrast, mythopoesis appears less frequently, suggesting that narrative-based legitimation is less central in short headline formats. Overall, the study concludes that headlines function as a strategic discursive site where legitimacy is actively produced and contested, shaping public perception by presenting political and military actions as reasonable, necessary, and morally defensible.

کلیدواژه ها:

legitimation strategies ، headlines ، information structure ، lexical choices ، conflict reporting ، Iran-Israel Confrontation