Reflections of the news on democracy in the local press (1946-1960 Malatya example)

In democratic systems, the press, which is described as the "fourth force" alongside the legislative, executive and judicial organs; It plays an important role in enlightening societies, spreading opinions and thoughts, and reaching all kinds of innovations and changes to society. Undoubtedly, the establishment, development and ontinuity of democracy depend on the correct and effective management of these functions. Because the public, which is the essence of emocracies, will increase their participation to the extent that they are aware of the system, and therefore a democratic system with high participation will function more healthily. As a matter of fact, the same was true for the press. We can often see that an impartial and free press comes to life in real democracies. In this direction, we can easily say that democracy and the press act in a positive relationship in which the existence of one depends on the other. Newspapers, which are almost the diaries of a nation, provide news sources about the social and political texture, values, personalities and institutions of the period in which they were published. With these news sources, newspapers are not only limited to the period they were published, but also contain rich library data from politics to history, from economy to education, from law to sociology and many disciplines in the following years. Therefore, we can say that these news sources presented by the newspapers are one of the most important materials used by the Social Studies course, which takes its source from the Social Sciences disciplines. The research has a qualitative design and a case study model was used in the qualitative data collection process. The reflections of the news about democracy between 1946-1960 in the local press of Malatya were determined as the main purpose of the research. In the research, 2 newspapers (Fırat and (Yeni) Malatya Postası) in the 1946-1960 Malatya local press in the Periodicals Archive of the National Library were determined as the study group. While scanning nearly 7000 newspaper pages among these newspapers, the criterion sampling method was used by taking the phenomenon of democracy as a criterion and a total of 891 news related to democracy were reached. These news were classified into 8 categories and coded. In addition, while the document analysis method was used to collect the data of the research, the content analysis technique was applied in the analysis of the data. The research consists of five parts. While the first part includes information about the purpose, importance, limitations, assumptions and definitions of the research, in the second part, the conceptual framework related to the research subject is formed and related researches are included. In the third chapter, information about the method and model of the research, what the study group is, which data collection tools and how the data were collected and how they were analyzed are mentioned in line with the aims and problems of the research. In the fourth part of the research, the findings obtained from the data collected with the qualitative data collection tools are explained by using the tables, while in the fifth, the last part of the research, the results obtained in line with the research findings are included; The results were discussed in line with the relevant findings, and suggestions for researchers were included. Keywords: Democracy, Press, Newspaper and News