Date of Award

Summer 2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Humanities

Committee Director

Frances Hassencahl

Committee Member

Avi Santo

Committee Member

Jonathan Leib

Abstract

Information dissemination is a need for human beings and it is a two way process. This two-way process can be in various formats and forms. One of the oldest ways is the newspaper, which has two types: online and print. While doing this important job, every news and column is influenced by the person who writes and edits it. The influence could be part of human nature; or it could result from an intentional selection of words, facts, and narratives. The latter emerged as an academic facet in social sciences and it is called framing. Framing theory discusses the intentional act of how information is processed and presented to influence the people. There is not a universal template of frames, but they emerged from the reading of the columns and news. In this study, I used a Q-sort to determine the categories.

People choose a newspaper mostly based on the editorial line, ideological congruity, distribution area of the newspaper, the diversity in news, and the portfolio of the columnists. The readers’ selection in news and columnists are not always the same. The columnist selection is rather more specific. For example, columnists have specific target audiences, and even some of them are not a regular reader of the specific newspapers. In Turkey, journalists who do not work in a newspaper, publish their work as freelancer journalists through their blogs.

This study examines the role of daily newspaper columnists in forming their audiences’ opinions through the frames that used in English and Turkish articles. To do that, I scrutinized the framing of the articles of the columnists in two ways: 1) Identifying the frames and tabulating the frequency of employing these frames, 2) Examining the framing differences of articles in English and Turkish version of the newspapers. I collected my data from the Turkish daily newspapers, Sabah and Hurriyet, and the English versions, Daily Sabah and Hurriyet Daily. I collected three articles for each columnist. In the first step, I analyzed 88 columnists and 264 articles. In the second step, I analyzed 26 columnists and 78 articles. Because of the varying schedules of the columnists, my first data collection started on July 17th, 2016 and the last data collection ended on September 21st, 2016.

According to my findings, the columnists contributed to formation of public opinion through the repetition of the certain frames in their articles.

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DOI

10.25777/vhd4-3k51

ISBN

9780355407914

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