The framing of terrorism in print newspapers: The case of october 10 Ankara attack

Terrorism is one of the things that countries do not want to encounter. In addition, terrorism is among the major events for the press across the world and is one of the most important events that set the agenda. Apart from setting the agenda of the press, it also plays a role in directing individuals' thoughts. When it is considered that the media also influence societies and directs their thoughts, it is seen that terrorism and media interact with each other. How the media set the agenda as regards terrorist incidents and how they frame such events in news texts constitute the fundamental problem of this study. The agenda setting and framing theories are the most appropriate ones for the purpose of this study. While the importance of terrorist events for the media is discussed within the scope of the agenda-setting theory, how they affect the reader in this way and which ideological implications they have are analyzed through the framing method. In this study, the coverage of the terrorist attack in Ankara on October 10, 2015 in the Turkish press was examined. First, the concept of communication and the effects of mass media are explained. In the second part, the theories of agenda setting and framing are discussed, and the connection between media and terrorism is explained. Then the subject, the purpose, the scope of the research, the research questions and the method of the research were mentioned. The terrorists attack chosen as the case study is investigated in chapter four. In this context, the first pages, the internal pages and column articles from the four selected newspapers Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Birgün and Sabah were examined through quantitative content analysis. In the last section, the results obtained after analyzing the coverage of the case by the quantitative analysis method are included. At the end of the study, it was seen that this terrorist attack was heavily featured in the Turkish press, setting the agenda. It was also concluded that the incident and the perpetrators of the incident were framed in terms with certain ideological implications. Keywords: Terrorism, Media, Agenda Setting, Framing, the Press