Representation of Women Politicians in the Turkish Media

ABSTRACT: The aim of the thesis is to explore representations of women politicians of the 21st century in the Turkish national newspapers. The content of this study consists of examining stereotypical thoughts and judgments about women politicians in the newspapers. Four different newspapers have been selected for the present study. These newspapers are Cumhuriyet (Republic), Hürriyet (Freedom), Sabah (Morning), and Zaman (Time). These newspapers are ideologically different from each other and they are in the top ranking of the most widely circulated newspapers in Turkey. The Fifteen women politicians from different continents of the world have been selected in order to analyze their representations in the news articles of the selected newspapers. These politicians are Angela Merkel (Germany), Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), Ellen Johonson Sirleaf (Liberia), Johanna Sigurdardottir (Iceland), Helle Thorning-Schmidt (Denmark), Hillary Clinton (U.S.A), Hina Rabbani Khar (Pakistan), Julia Gillard (Australia), Mara Carfagna (Italy), Nimet Çubukçu (Turkey), Roza Otunbayeva (Kyrgyzstan), Sarah Palin (U.S.A), Segolene Royal (France) and Yulia Timoşenko (Ukraine). In general, ‘women’ and ‘women politicians’ are represented to the readers/audience in a stereotypical fashion by the mainstream media. Based on this assumption, the news on the fifteen women politicians are analyzed on the websites of the four selected newspapers. The data is available through online news archive scanning system of the newspapers. News articles about the politicians are selected according to each politician’s beginning of the office time till the end of the office time. If there is any politician who is still in the office, time limitation is identified as the end of the year 2011 (December 31, 2011). In total, 540 news articles were selected as the sample of the study. The articles are analyzed according to stereotypical words like ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ as woman figure; ‘clothing’, ‘accessories’ and ‘shoes’ as appearance; ‘sexy’, ‘attractive’, ‘beautiful’ as sexually oriented words; ‘motherhood’, ‘animal love’ and ‘cry’ as emotional appeal; ‘marital status’, ‘family’ and ‘housework’ as private life; and ‘gender’ and ‘age’ of the politicians’ are also highlighted in the news. This study used quantitative content analysis. The data were analyzed with SPSS to see how often stereotypical words are used to describe women politicians. Content analysis was applied on headlines, subtitles and contexts of the 540 news items. Moreover, pictures that accompany to the news articles were also evaluated according to the categorization (‘sexuality’, ‘motherhood’, ‘emotional’ and other) of the study. The findings of the study indicate that there are statistically significant differences on the representation of the women politicians between the newspapers. Popular newspapers, Hürriyet and Sabah have given more stereotypical coverage on the women politicians than opinion newspapers, Zaman and Cumhuriyet. Furthermore, statistical results suggest that “age” and “gender” of the politicians are frequently highlighted in the news stories. Also, pictures of women politicians include sexuality. Keywords: Woman, media, politician, stereotype, representation, politics. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………