Media and democracy in Turkey: the 2011 Turkish national election coverage

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the ability of the Turkish media to fulfil its democratic role for the Turkish public by case studying the 2011 national Turkish elections. Given the limited number of previous studies existing on Turkey, this thesis takes the notion of the press politics relationship, as put forward by Bennett, and economic pressures influencing the way in which the press functions to question whether the Turkish media effectively carries out a watchdog and messenger role. This study codes newspaper articles leading up to the elections to test the hypothesis that despite continued patterns of polarized parallelism, the media coverage will reinforce the AKP‟s consolidated governmental position. Split into two separate research question, the first research question discusses the coded article characteristics and keywords to draw out patterns and trends apparent in the coverage with a major focus on sources, main article subjects and handling of critical agenda issues. This lays the foundation for the second research question in which an in depth textual analysis is employed to determine the frames being put forward by publications when relaying two topics drawn from the data set - the Inan Kirac and Prime Minister Erdogan conflict and foreign press commentary - to make conclusions about the press politics relationship and position of the AKP in Turkey. Ultimately, this study argues that the press politics relationship is defined by the AKP‟s strong political position and media coverage serves to support this position by largely employing the frames put forward by the government to generate neutral or positive commentary, instead of offering critical coverage or diversity in reporting.