Discursive construction of the hegemonic power: The Turkish President on televised panel interviews

Conflicting with the journalistic notions of neutrality and accountability, political interviews in Turkey, especially in the last decade, turned into a channel of consolidation of power and propaganda. Earlier research discussed the causes and implications of this transition through the lens of the changing political landscape and the consolidation of the Turkish media in the last decades. Despite this, there is limited research on the language and discursive features of political interviews as they exist in this context. In order to bridge this gap, the present thesis explores televised interviews with the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with a focus on panel interviews that involve 2 or more interviewers. A corpus consisting of 20 interviews from 2013 to 2023 is analyzed through a discourse analytic methodology. The data-driven approach yielded two main aspects of the discourse of these interviews. Firstly, the interviewee's organization and strategical utilization of expressive discourse and factual/logical discourse allowed for his transmissional and interpersonal dominance in the interviews. Secondly, questions formulated by the interviewers and the overall organizational and semiotic structure of the programming served to empower the interviewee and legitimize his authority. These findings are discussed in relation to the notions of interview society, factual and expressive discourses, and critical discourse analysis.