A Comparative Study on the Structure and the Content Covering of Political Events of Iran in National and International Websites

The objective of this study is to offer a comparative analysis of the structure and the content covering of political events of Iran by national and international websites. The structure of the research was based on then logic of content analysis. The main focus of this paper is on a comparative study on the structure and the content covering of political events among IRNA website as an Iranian official news agency and BBC-Persian and VOA sites. We will examine how these sites chose to put their emphasis on Iran’s political events. Statistical society in this study is consisted of all Iran news in the area of political and foreign affairs. The study was done in six-month period from January to June 2008. The sample size of this study included some 571 news and the sampling was done based on a random and systematic sampling during a two-week period. The unit of analysis was considered to be news. Descriptive and analytical findings indicate that there is a difference between IRNA, BBC-Persian and VOA. Each of the three websites put emphasis on “who” and news values considering the issue of reputation of the prominent people. This tendency indicates their personal idealism. All the news in the three websites is considered not to have been produced by the site and the share of IRNA in unproductiveness is more than the other three. Nuclear weapon was the main topic of the mentioned sites. A greater volume of news in IRNA and VOA were based on “hard news’ than BBC while BBC focused more on “soft news” along with follow-up information. News websites mostly use “photo” from all the facilities of multi-media. Unlike IRNA, BBC and VOA used more E-mail that was relevant to the subject matters of their sites.