Abstract This paper sets up to show how irony and reservations are explicitated in online media discourse, comparing their realizations in French and Hebrew online op-eds in leading journals. A corpus-based qualitative and quantitative analysis relies on two sets of big corpora for each language. The pragmatic analysis distinguishes between explicitating self- and other's presumed ironic intents, the target of irony, its locus and overall speaker's meanings. The findings indicate that the French data-set uses the verb ironiser, which has no comparable equivalent in Hebrew. More puzzling are the similarities between the two data-sets: both in French and in Hebrew journalists choose to explicitate irony and reservations, and they do so using similar discursive patterns. Conflicting forces are at play: interpretation paths are opened by irony, and are then narrowed down by the journalist's interpretations. The results are interpreted in terms of informativeness, accountability and commitment to speaker's meaning.