Headlines in Newspaper Editorials

Newspaper editorials constitute a part of media discourse, which isan extremely important field of research in intercultural rhetoric analysis and EFL(English as a foreign language)/ESL (English as a second language) studies.Specifically, certain features of editorial headlines and also their important role inmonitoring and directing readers’ attention have made the interface between thelinguistic analysis of newspaper editorial headlines and teaching of EFL as a relevantissue in language teaching. Through conducting a contrastive textual analysis ofselected headlines, culled from the editorials of the English newspaper, The New YorkTimes, and those of Persian newspaper, Tehran Times, the present study aimed atexploring the kind of textual and rhetorical strategies the two newspapers used forpropagating their preferred ideologies. The results of the study indicated thatheadlines in the two papers presented a subjective attitude of the writers (newspapers)toward the topic. However, based on the analysis of the data, it became clear that therewere certain differences between the two sets of headlines in terms of Presupposition,and certain Rhetorical devices