The political leader representation in the wri̇tten press: The examples of Erdoğan, İhsanoğlu and Demirtaş

With the advent of neoliberal policies after 1980, the concept of media, arising from the production of newspapers and magazines and known as press until the 1990s, has become an institution which aims to gain more income and shapes its ideologies for this purpose. The press, which is, undoubtedly, one of the most effective media as regards conveying the views and opinions of the political actors and the governments in power, has begun to arrange broadcasting policies in line with their interests and ideologies, which is still a reality today. Ideologies are of great significance with respect to conveying the news. An event which occurs in a specific place and time can be presented to masses in various ways according to the ideological point of view. This study aimed to analyse the reflections of the 12th presidential election in Turkish press, which was held on 10 August 2014 and kept the agenda in Turkey busy for a long time, and the way the candidates were represented in the newspapers. Our main hypothesis prior to the study was that the newspapers with different ideologies can design different realities about the same event. In this study, we used macro discourse analysis by Teun Van Dijk to demonstrate the ideological differences in the newspapers and how ownership structures become effective in the building of related news scripts. The news texts which were analysed in the study consist of the titles, spot news, subtitles, news stories that were published on the front pages of the Hurriyet, Sabah and Sozcu during the period of 3-17 August 2014. By following the issues of 3different newspapers for 15 days, we tried to find out how these newspapers shaped their news stories and their attitudes, and the similarities between them. The findings indicated that newspapers form the news in accordance with their own ideologies and interests. Keywords: Media, Discourse, Ideology, Politics, Election, Representation