The Transformation of Political Coverage in Turkey under the AKP Regime

The fourth presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Lemi Baruh, who shifts our focus to election press coverage in Turkey. Turkey has undergone a gradual process of political transformation, with growing government influence on the media, but media in Turkey have often been researched using convenience samples, and short-term studies; the present study addresses this by covering four national election campaigns from 2002 to 2015, and by using newspaper readership data and content analysis for 15 newspapers in the country.

Press-party parallelism theory suggests that commercial media structures often parallel political structures; media partisanship is also a positioning strategy to arrest reader erosion. Mergers between media organisations can further cement such ideological positioning and can lead to further political polarisation.

Turkey can now be described as a competitive authoritarian system, where elections are routinely held, democratic institutions are procedurally present, and pockets of opposition continue to exist, but there is strong government control of all systems including the media.

When the AKP came to power in 2002, a clientelist system with highly concentrated media ownership and a declining power of media trade unions was already in place. This helped the party to take control of the media environment, in part through a takeover of several media outlets by back regulators, forced sales to AKP-aligned figures, and a radial forcing out of oppositional news operators.

The present analysis examined the front page and a randomly selected election news page from some 15 newspapers during elections from 2002 to 2015. During this time, because of the takeovers and other interventions, the number of mainstream-aligned newspapers declined, while conservative alignments increased. Newspaper ownership changes also strongly impacted on readership, which often declined soon after such takeovers.

Visibility of the AKP in election coverage grows substantially over this time, while the other parties are less and less visible. This is especially pronounced in the conservative newspapers, but also the case in mainstream and oppositional papers. Opposition parties are mainly covered in mainstream and opposition papers, but even here not nearly on a level comparable to the AKP.

Positive coverage of the AKP is increasing strongly in conservative papers over this time, mirrored by increasingly negative coverage of the other parties. This is not repeated in the mainstream and oppositional papers, where coverage overall remains more neutral. All of this points to significant gains in the Turkish media system for just one party – the government party AKP.