Ideology, media and popular music: Turkey's Eurovision contest process as a field of hegemony

Ideology is not only a conflict between competing systems of meanings, but also the ability to express their own representations as direct reflections of reality and to produce their own meanings as experience. In other words, ideology is a system of representation. The representation refers to an active selection, presentation, structuring and formation. It implies not only the transfer of meaning but the work of giving meaning to more active things. It is a practice and a production of meaning. The media here is the interpreter of the meaning. According to Haul, the media, together with other interpreter institutions, are no longer treated as institutions that reflect and support only consensus, but as institutions that help produce consensus and to produce consent. The key term here is "hegemony" (Ergun, 2015: 1448-1449). Hegemony, is both the basis and the result of the process of struggle between consent and resistance carried out by the institutional or individual interpreters involved in the process of interpretation. It constantly changes, so, hegemony is a "isostaticity under motion". In this context, it is considered to be an important analytical lens in understanding the processes (participation, elimination, representation, etc.) of the Eurovision Song Contest in Turkey. Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is one of the most important music organizations in Europe and even in the world. For Turkey, the Eurovision Song Contest, which has begun to be organized by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) since 1956, has a social, cultural, political and musical significance. In fact, this competition is not only for Turkey, but also is important in terms of all the countries which are members of the EBU. The aim of the Union is to exchange programs among its members and to have a unifying effect on post-war European continent broadcasting. With Turkey's participation in the competition since 1975, this contest has been discussed from the perspective of academic or non-academic by many actors framing it, including TRT, mainly state-controlled mass media. In fact, this study does not attempt to make a critique of previous evaluations. The research here, by taking both overall Eurovision Song Contest in the framework of international organizations integrity and the example of Turkey, represents an attempt trying to understand and analyze the constituent components of this process within the axis of ideology, the media and the hegemony.