Based on the principles of critical discourse analysis this contrastive study sought to investigate the effect of culture on the journalistic style and the strategies used to report news in the American and Persian newspaper editorials. To this end, articles were selected from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Kayhan and Ettelaat, taking Iran's nuclear dispute as the tertium comparationis for the selection of the articles. The analysis involved primarily a demarcation of the micro genres of the selected texts. Based on the principles of the newly developed appraisal theory, patterns of interpersonal rhetoric, devised in the texts to shape public opinion, were investigated. Attitudinal lexis and naming choices and expressions were also examined to discover the different strategies used in the editorials of the two languages to communicate their evaluations of the specified subject matter. Using a Chi-square test, no statistically significant difference was found between the editorials of the two languages for the selected criteria. Given the war of words between the two nations, the selected editorials were found to utilize quite similar strategies to perpetuate their own ideologies and to diminish the effects of the rival newspapers, leaving no room for culture to affect their strategies. (Contains 3 tables.)