The Failure of Turkish Mainstream Media: A Framing Comparison of The Web Versions of Turkish Newspapers

Abstract

The objective of this study is to define the notion of mainstream/professional journalism by comparatively exploring the historical conditions of media systems development to contrast it with the infrastructure of political culture and professional culture of the past century in Turkey. After this theoretical background, we implemented a comparative framing analysis of an actual policy debate in the Turkish press to conclude on the changing and not changing conditions that prevail in the politics/media system and culture. In the light of the framing analysis, we found that the current state of the Turkish media system constitutes still a mostly dysfunctional social interaction platform that is caught between media parallelism and tabloidization and represents a largely underdeveloped professionalism that is still insufficient for the development of a civil society. Nonetheless, we found on the other hand that the fundamental values and notion of mainstream media is still represented to make hope for a future development towards a functioning media system.

Keywords

• mainstream journalism
• turkish media
• journalism ethics
• political culture
• framing analysis.
• ana akım gazetecilik
• türk medyası
• habercilik etiği
• siyasi kültür
• çerçeveleme analizi.