With the emergence of development communication since the 1960s, the media have been recognized as influential actors in explaining, facilitating participation in, and advancing development processes. In Iran, the national broadcaster has assumed a central role in the representation of development-related news. The question of “What mentalities exist regarding development communication and development news within the IRIB News Agency, and how do its news professionals evaluate the current state of development news in the country?” becomes salient. To address this question, this study employed Q methodology and was conducted in several stages. First, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with economic desk editors and senior managers at the IRIB News Agency, and the resulting data were coded and analyzed. Subsequently, from than 450 initial categories, 36 unique statements were extracted and presented to editors, senior editors, and managers for Q-sorting. Factor analysis was performed using SPSS, and through the typology of responses, four dominant mentalities were identified.

The findings of the study indicate the existence of four prevailing mentalities toward development news at the IRIB News Agency: critical accountability and monitoring, instrumental explanatory orientation, indigenous indicator-based orientation, and people-centered simplification. Moreover, the results show that these mentalities converge along four shared dimensions: the absence of a clear consensus on the localization of development news; the use of repetitive development-related news as a mechanism for follow-up and discourse construction; the limited importance attributed to news background and contextualization; and the perceived necessity of simplifying development news through visual formats.