HOW TURKISH COLUMNIST FRAMED GENERAL ELECTION IN TURKEY HELD IN NOVEMBER 2015 VIA TWITTER

Year 2017, Volume: 25 Issue: 3, 78 - 95, 01.06.2017

Deniz Kılıç N. Bilge İspir

Abstract

HOW TURKISH COLUMNIST FRAMED GENERAL ELECTION IN TURKEY HELD IN NOVEMBER 2015 VIA TWITTER

Abstract

More than 35 million people in Turkey use twitter. A lot of people uses for social media include entertainment, sports, and lifestyle as well as following personalities. Also Twitter is good for news gathering, getting information and arguing with other people in media. Followers use journalist/columnists’ tweets primarily as a news source to keep up to date on key issues and politics. However another reason is that followers have a guidance motive, meaning that they depend on tweets from journalist/columnist to guide their decisions on how to vote and what positions to take on an issue. After all media framing theory provide an insight to how the media can influence their audience. Framing refers to the process by which people develop a particular conceptualization of an issue or reorient their thinking about an issue. The main purpose of this study is to examine the columnists’ attention that Turkey general election in the 2015 November 1st received and this communication theory plays a significant role within the research. In this study, how journalists/columnists framed their tweet about electoral topics was represented. This study examines 1224 tweets and retweets of the top 18 most followed accounts journalist/columnists on twitter in the 2015 November 1st about Turkey general election. Study covers the time period of 23th October 8th November 2015 about the key topics dominating the electoral debate. The data gathered through content analysis reveal that the mostly placed tweet topics are terrorism, the erosion of freedoms, civil liberties, and rule of law; constitutional reform; the shift to a presidential system; the economic slowdown; the Kurdish issue; and Turkey’s foreign policy. Five trained coders analyzed the tweets studied. Inter-coder reliability was 87%. Findings indicate that most important topics are coalition meetings, civil liberties, media freedom and terrorism according to tweets of columnists

Keywords

Framing, Twitter, Social Media, General Elections, Journalism

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