Exploring News Coverage of Education: A Case Study of Turkish News Portals
Öz
The media holds the potential to play a pivotal role in facilitating a robust communication process within education policy debates. When effectively implemented, this communication process enables the media to contribute to shaping public opinion and conveying the demands of students and parents to decision-makers. Reciprocally, the perspectives of policymakers can be disseminated through the media to all stakeholders within the educational sphere. However, this assumption relies on an idealized environment where the primary objective of news media is to inform the public, and where society places a high degree of trust in the news organizations it follows. The primary objective of this study is to examine the coverage of education-related news in the media. The methodological framework is grounded in content analysis. Considering the transformations driven by the rapid evolution of digital journalism over the last decade, major news portals operating in Turkey were selected for the sample. The selection of these portals was based on criteria including web traffic, political orientation, and ownership structures. The sample comprises 9119 education-related news items and columns published across ten Turkish news portals (birgun.net, cumhuriyet.com.tr, haberturk.com.tr, hurriyet.com.tr, milliyet.com.tr, sabah.com.tr, sozcu.com.tr, yeniakit.com.tr, yenicaggazetesi.com.tr, yenisafak.com) during the years 2020, 2021, and 2022. The study seeks to answer the main research question: "How is education represented in digital news portals in Turkey?" The overall results indicate that routine news reports constitute the vast majority of the sampled content, whereas opinion pieces and investigative articles regarding education remain limited. Furthermore, the data reveals a rapid proliferation of clickbait-style texts and SEO-driven content. This trend appears to be contaminating the content of education news and posing a significant threat to quality journalism.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Education Reporting, Education Coverage, Turkish Media, Clickbait, SEO
Destekleyen Kurum
TÜBİTAK
Proje Numarası
222K185
Etik Beyan
Bu çalışma, “Yükseköğretim Kurumları Bilimsel Araştırma ve Yayın Etiği Yönergesi”nde belirtilen kurallara uygun olarak hazırlanmıştır. Ayrıca, makale intihal tespit programları (Turnitin / iThenticate) ile taranmış ve herhangi bir intihale rastlanmamıştır.
Teşekkür
Bu makale, “222K185” numaralı proje kapsamında, “Türkiye’de Eğitim Haberciliğinin Geliştirilmesi” başlıklı TÜBİTAK araştırma projesi çerçevesinde toplanan verilerle hazırlanmıştır. Bu araştırmayı desteklediği için TÜBİTAK’a teşekkür ederiz.
Kaynakça
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