As part of a study conducted by Dr. Sadettin Demirel and Dr. Neslihan Bulur Demirel, faculty members of the Faculty of Communication at Üsküdar University, social media posts shared by public media and international Turkish-language broadcasters during four elections held between January 1, 2015 and June 1, 2023 were examined.
The study, which analyzed 1.5 million tweets, found that international broadcasters functioned as a “surrogate public sphere” by maintaining editorial balance.
The research was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, which is indexed in internationally peer-reviewed SSCI (Q1) and Scopus (Q1).
A comprehensive academic study on how media visibility is shaped during election periods in Türkiye revealed that the editorial gap between public media and international Turkish-language broadcasters in Türkiye has increased significantly over the years.
The article, titled “State apparatus vs. surrogate sphere: a comparative analysis of domestic and international media in Turkish elections,” prepared by faculty members of the Faculty of Communication at Üsküdar University, was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, which is indexed in internationally peer-reviewed SSCI (Q1) and Scopus (Q1).
The study examines the editorial divergence between domestic public media in Türkiye (Anadolu Agency and TRT) and international public broadcasters (BBC Türkçe, DW Türkçe, and Sputnik Türkiye).
1.5 million tweets analyzed
As part of the research, a dataset of approximately 1.5 million tweets shared by the relevant media organizations between January 1, 2015 and June 1, 2023 was analyzed.
From this dataset, 22,739 campaign-focused posts related to election periods were identified and examined in terms of the visibility of political parties, thematic framing, and the discursive positioning of actors. Artificial intelligence models were utilized during the thematic classification stage of the study.
Visibility varies…
The statistical findings of the study reveal that the visibility of the ruling party in domestic public media increased systematically over the years.
While the share of visibility allocated to the ruling party by public media was measured at 56.6 percent in the 2015 general elections, this figure rose to 92.3 percent in the 2023 elections. During the same period, the visibility of the main opposition party in domestic public media declined from 19.2 percent to 2.8 percent.
“Partisan capture” and the “surrogate public sphere”
The study explains the editorial shift of domestic public media toward the control of the ruling party with the concept of “partisan capture.” In contrast, international broadcasters such as BBC Türkçe, DW Türkçe, and Sputnik Türkiye were found to provide more balanced visibility to opposition parties and to grant political actors space to act as subjects.
The researchers state that, in this respect, international media assume the function of a “surrogate public sphere” within Türkiye’s constrained media environment.