Ideological formation in Turkish newspapers: An analysis of the news about the headscarf issue

OpenAlex · English

Changes in society and culture show themselves through their tentativeness, incompleteness and contradictory nature in the heterogeneous and shifting discursive practices of the media. The words and concepts used in news are formatted in accordance with the cultural and ideological structure of the news agency of the respective country. Apart from the dominant discourses, the way that the signs are stressed in these discourses is re-structured in news: the universal codes used for the narration of news, as well as the way they are conveyed and clichd, form the news texts. Stating the views of socially esteemed persons helps define and also reproduce the dominant powers. The media cannot create the news topics independently, whereas reliable institutional sources draw attention to certain topics. Sociologically and politically, significant events are conveyed with messages suitable to the ideological structure of every culture as a producer. Therefore, messages pertaining to the same event may display differences with regard to form and content. The purpose of this study is to analyse the front pages of two newspapers issued in Turkey, namely Cumhuriyet, displaying a leftist ideology and Yeni Safak, representing a reactionary attitude. The news that appeared on the front pages of these newspapers will be analysed using van Dijk's and Fairclough's methods. This study aims to find out how the ideological formations in these newspapers is performed and discussed within the context of the news and also to display the differences between the two newspapers, if any.