Turkish Communication and Media Policies as Reflected in Government Programs: A Historical Analysis between 1923 and 2014

PDF
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/cicms.2756
Ümit Atabek
Yaşar University
Gülseren Şendur Atabek
Yaşar University
Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to explore Turkish communication and media policies through governmental programs. Governmental programs are valuable sources for tracing the historical development and change of public policies on communication and media. Our research examines 60 governmental programs. We used content analysis methodology in order to examine the communication and media policies in these programs. As unstructured data, the texts of 60 governmental programs (a corpus of 892 pages) are pre-processed (tokenized, stemmed, tagged and cleaned) by KNIME, an open source software for text analysis and data mining. Additionally, we developed a term dictionary for searching communication and media policies. These dictionary terms helped us exploring the themes of governmental policies. Finally, we graphed the data suitably for the historical analysis of themes in order to trace the policy changes. Our research findings helped us to monitor the changes in Turkish communication and media eco-system with regard to specific technologies such as newspaper, radio, television and internet. We also explored certain policy concepts on communication and media freedoms and rights. The analysis revealed that almost all governments included communication and media related issues in their programs, and the amount of references to communication and media policies increased historically. It is also found that the political differences of governments did not cause much difference in their quantitative references to communication and media issues.

Article Details
  • Section
  • Articles

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

References
Altan Arslan, Ş. (2017). Kadın odaklı politikaların hükümet programlarına yansımaları üzerine bir analiz. TBB Dergisi. Özel Sayı, 411-440.
Aykın, A. G. & Bilir ,F. P. (2013). Hükümet programları ve spor politikaları. Ç.Ü. Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 22(2), 239-254
Bakos, G. (2013). KNIME Essentials: Perform accurate data analysis using the power of KNIME. Birmingham: Pact Publishing.
Berelson, B. (1952). Content Analysis in Communication Research. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press.
Berthold, M. R., Cebron, N., Dill, F., Gabriel, T. R., Kötter, T., Meinl, T. & Wiswedel, B. (2009). KNIME - the Konstanz information miner. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 11(1), 26-31.
Cunningham, H., Maynard, D., Bontcheva, K. & Tablan, V. (2002). GATE: an Architecture for Development of Robust HLT Applications. In Proceedings of the 4 th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Çoban, A. (2018). Cumhuriyet dönemi hükümet programları ve öğretmenlik mesleği. Elektronik Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi/Electronic Journal of Social Sciences, 17(67), 1278-1301.
Duverger, Maurice (1990). Metodoloji Açısından Sosyal Bilimlere Giriş. İstanbul: Bilgi.
Eagleton. (1996). Literary Theory: An Introduction (2nd Edition). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Eagleton T. (1978). Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.
Enli, G., Moe, H., Schanke Sundet, W. & Syvertsen, T. (2013). From Fear of Television to Fear for Television: Five political debates about new technologies. Media History, 19(2), 213-227.
Evans, W. (1996). Computer-Supported Content Analysis: Trends, Tools, and Techniques. Social Science Computer Review, 14(3), 269-279.
Fairclough, N. (1988). Register, power and socio-semantic change. In Birch and O’Toole (eds.). Functions of Style. London: Frances Pinter, 111–125.
Frey, L., Botan, C., & Kreps, G. (1999). Investigating communication: An introduction to research methods (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Fürsich, E. (2009). In defense of textual analysis: Restoring a challenged method for journalism and media studies. Journalism Studies, 10(2), 238-252.
Güleç Solak, S. & Sürmeli, İ. (2015). Hükümet Programları ve Kalkınma Planları Ekseninde Çevre Politikası Analiz. Yasama Dergisi, 30, 22-43.
Higuchi, K. (2016). KH Coder 3 Reference Manual. http://khcoder.net/en/manual_en_v3.pdf
Holsti, O. R. (1969). Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Jameson, F. (2002). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. London: Routledge.
Krippendorf, K. (1980). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (2nd. Edition). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lerner, D. (1966). The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: Free Press.
Lowe, W. (2015). Yoshikoder: Cross-platform multilingual content analysis. Java software version 0.6.5, http://conjugateprior.org/software/yoshikoder/
Mair P. (2005). Democracy beyond Parties. Working Paper 5- 6, Center for the Study of Democracy, University of California, Irvine.
Mckee, A. (2003). Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Sage.
Mergenthaler, E. (1996). Computer-Assisted Content Analysis. In C. Züll, J. Harkness, & J. H. P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik (Eds.), Text analysis and computers (pp. 3-32). Mannheim: ZUMA.
Pasco A. H. (2004). Literature as Historical Archive, New Literary History. 35(3), 373-394.
Ruiza, B. J., Rodriguez, V. & Bermann, C. (2007). Analysis and perspectives of the government programs to promote the renewable electricity generation in Brazil. Energy Policy, 35, 2989-2994.
Schramm, W. (1965). Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries. California: Stanford University Press.
Stone, P. J. & Hunt, E. B. (1963). A computer approach to content analysis: studies using the General Inquirer system. In Proceedings of the May 21-23, 1963, AFIPS '63 Spring. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 241-256.
Storey, J. (2013). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, New York: Routledge.
Thomas, S. (1994). Artifactual Study in the Analysis of Culture: A Defense of Content Analysis in a Post Modern Age. Communication Research, 21(6), 683-697.
Tursi, V. & Silipo, R. (2018). From words to wisdom: An introduction to text mining with KNIME. Zurich: KNIME Press.
Weber, M. (1998). Preliminary report on a proposed survey for a sociology of the press. History of the Human Sciences, 11(2), 111-120.