The political discourse in media on 2011 Turkish general elections from the perspective of framing theory in mass communication

Framing theory in mass communication has added a new dimension to political communication research and has become a guide to understand how issues are presented and how discourse are structured in news media. In this respect, news framing research focus both analyzing news texts and understanding role of the media in political life. Particularly, news (media) frames play an important role in analyzing political discourse in election periods. In this study, which three newspapers representing Turkish press were selected as sample, 2011 Turkish general elections were taken in the context of framing theory through the path of research design created. The main questions of this research that seeks an answer are how often news actors were reported in the news contents, which news actors are dominant as news source, to what extent the news reflect the political actors' frames, in which tone the political parties and their leaders were covered, and how politics are framed. According to the results obtained, it has been found that the parties, participated in the election, and their leaders were not represented in the news, equally. The data also indicates that the newspapers were substantially depended on particular political actors as a source, and these actors' political discourses were mediated more. In addition to framing bias among newspapers in framing of the meeting news, it has emerged that there were significant differences in covering tone of the political parties and leaders in the news texts. Furthermore, it's been set that the ideological tendencies of the newspapers had an effect on the distribution of specific frames associated with the political actors' political discourses. Moreover, in election process, it's been infered that the politics were generally framed in conflict, political debates and election promises were not echoed in news texts. Keywords: mass communication, political communication, framing theory, news framing, political discourse, news discourse, 2011 general elections of Turkey.