Who is spreading the virus? An analysis of TV news coverage of disinformation about COVID-19 in Turkey
Palavras-chave:
disinformation, media, populist communication, COVID-19, TV NewsResumo
The COVID-19 pandemic characterizes a process that is capable of reorganizing modern institutions with an unprecedented impact in history. In this process, people’s access to accurate information gains prominence. The negative correlation between the increasing volume of information in social media and access to accurate information may canalize people back to traditional media. Would it be correct to say that the news produced in traditional media (particularly in TV broadcasting) does not contain disinformation? This article examines the disinformation in TV news by analysing the news texts about the Coronavirus in the main news bulletins starting from the week when the first case was diagnosed. This paper, which tries to understand how COVID-19 was projected to the society in the early days and thereafter how the society was canalized against the global crisis, analyses at how political power is represented, framed, and how news discourse is constructed in COVID-19 news. The two most-watched news bulletins in Turkey throughout March and August in 2020 (ATV and FOX TV) were examined using descriptive analysis. In the analysis, it was found that the news discourses, which are polarized as pro-government and opposition, are projected in a context that praises or criticizes political power. In the study, it was concluded that the causalities and consequences of the crisis are decontextualized by instrumentalizing and/or tabloidizing.Referências
(2017). Referandum 2017. NTV. http://referandum.ntv.com.tr/.
(2018). Televizyon ˙Izleme E˘gilimleri Ara¸stirmasi. Radyo, Televizyon Üst Kurulu. www.rtuk.gov.tr/assets/Icerik/AltSiteler/televizyonizlemeegilimleriarastirmasi2018.pdf.
(2020). Combatting COVID-19 disinformation on online platforms. Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation – OCDE. Paris.
Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2020). L’invenzione di un’epidemia. Quodlibet. www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione- di-un-epidemia.
Akgül, H. (2019). Fake news as a tool of populism in Turkey: The Pastor Andrew Brunson case. Polish Political Science Review, 7(2), 32-51.
Anceschi, L. (2015). The persistence of media control under consolidated authoritarianism: Containing kazakhstan’s digital media. Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 23(3), 277-295.
A¸skın, A. (2015). Dezenformayon: Küresel ve Yerel. Epos.
Aydın, U. (2015). Neoliberal muhafazakar medya. Ayrinti.
Bagdikian, B., Artz, L., Chitty, N., Cowan, G., He, Z., Karim, K., & Kellner, D. (2004). War, media, and propaganda: A global perspective. Rowman & Littlefield.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Sage.
Bek, M. (2004a). Tabloidization of news media: An analysis of television news in Turkey. European Journal of Communication, 19(3), 371-386.
Bek, M. (2004b). Türkiye’de Televizyon Habercili˘gi ve Tabloidle¸sme. ileti¸sim: ara¸stırmaları, 2(1), 9-38.
Bergmann, E. (2020). Populism and the politics of misinformation. Safundi, 21(3), 251-265.
Boberg, S., Quandt, T., Schatto-Eckrodt, T., & Frischlich, L. (2020). Pandemic populism: Facebook pages of alternative news media and the corona crisis – A computational content analysis. Muenster Online Research. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02566.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). On television. The New Press.
Brown, F.(1937). Media of propaganda. The Journal of Educational Sociology, 10(6), 323-330.
Buchanan, T., & Benson, V. (2019). Spreading disinformation on Facebook: Do trust in message source, risk propensity, or personality affect the organic reach of “Fake News”?. Social Media+ Society, 5(4).
Casero-Ripollés, A. (2020). Impact of Covid-19 on the media system. Communicative and democratic consequences of news consumption during the outbreak. El profesional de la información, 29(2).
Çelik, B. (2020). Screening for Erdo˘ganism: Television, post-truth and political fear. European Journal of Communication, 35(4), 339-354.
Chesney, R., & Citron, D. (2019). Deepfakes and the new disinformation war: The coming age of post-truth geopolitics. Foreign Affairs. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-12-11/deepfakes-and-new-disinformation-war.
Cheyfitz, E. (2017). The Disinformation Age the Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States. Routledge.
Chomsky, N. (2002). Media control: The spectacular achievements of propaganda. Seven Stories Press.
Christensen, C. (2007). Concentration of ownership, the fall of unions and government legislation in Turkey. Global Media and Communication, 3(2), 179-199.
Colliander, J. (2019). “This is fake news”: Investigating the role of conformity to other users’ views when commenting on and spreading disinformation in social media. Computers in Human Behavior, (97), 202-215.
Creswell, J. (2011). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative. Pearson.
Dukalskis, A. (2017). The authoritarian public sphere: Legitimation and autocratic power in North Korea, Burma, and China. Taylor & Francis.
Eco, U. (2006). A Passo di Gambero: Guerre calde e populismo mediatico. Bompiani.
Erçetin, T., & Erdo˘gan, E. (2021). ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, please tell me...’: the populist rhetoric of the ‘new’media of ‘new Turkey’ during the April 16, 2017 referendum. Turkish Studies, 22(2), 1-24.
Erdo˘gan, E., & Erçetin, T. (2019). Popülist Liderlerinin Ba¸sarısına Medya Sistemleri Perspektifinden Bir Bakı¸s: Birle¸sik Krallık, Hollanda ve Türkiye Kar¸sıla¸stırması. Moment Dergi, 6(1), 38-74.
Gautier, J., & Ravussin, Y. (2020). A new symptom of COVID-19: Loss of taste and smell. Obesity, 28(5), 848-848.
Giddens, A. (1996). The consequences of modernity. Polity Press.
Hameleers, M. (2020). Populist disinformation: Exploring intersections between online populism and disinformation in the US and the Netherlands. Politics and Governance, 8(1), 146-157.
Islam, M., Sarkar, T., Khan, S., Kamal, A., Hasan, S., Kabir, A., ..., & Seale, H. (2020). COVID-19–related infodemic and its impact on public health: A global social media analysis. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 103(4), 1621-1629.
Karaömerlio˘glu, A. (2020). Küresel popülizm ve kutupla¸sma. T24 Ba˘gımsız ˙Internet Gazetesi. https://t24.com.tr/yazarlar/asim-karaomerlioglu/kuresel-populizm-vekutuplasma, 28222.
Kellam, M., & Stein, E. (2017). Trump’s war on the news media is serious. Just look at Latin America. The Washington Post, 16(2).
Kırkpınar, D. (2009). 12 Eylül Askeri Darbesi’nin gençli˘gin üzerindeki etkileri [Doctoral dissertation] Dokuz Eylül University Principals of Atatürk and Revolution History Institute. https://acikerisim.deu.edu.tr/xmlui/handle/20.500.12397/6666.
Krämer, B. (2014). Media populism: A conceptual clarification and some theses on its effects. Communication Theory, 24(1), 42-60.
Kuckartz, U. (2014). Qualitative text analysis: A guide to methods, practice and using software. Sage.
Lears, T. (1985). The concept of cultural hegemony: Problems and possibilities. The American Historical Review, 90(3), 567-593.
Lindlof, T. (1995). Qualitative communication research methods. Sage.
Manaev, O. (2014). Media in post-soviet belarus: between democratization and reinforcing authoritarianism. Demokratizatsiya, 22(2).
Marcuse, H. (2013). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Routledge.
McIntyre, L. (2018). Post-truth. MIT Press.
Miller, D. (2003). Tell me lies: Propaganda and media distortion in the attack on Iraq. Pluto Press.
Mishra, P. (2017). Politics in the age of resentment: the dark legacy of the enlightenment. In H. Geiselberger (Ed.), The great regression (pp. 104-116). Polity Press.
Moffitt, B. (2015). How to perform crisis: A model for understanding the key role of crisis in contemporary populism. Government and Opposition, 50(2), 189-217.
Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representation. Stanford University Press.
Nielsen, R., Newman, N., Fletcher, R., & Kalogeropoulos, A. (2019). Reuters institute digital news report 2019. Report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Oliveira, L., Sequeira, A., Oliveira, A., Silva, P., & Mesquita, A. (2021). Exploring the public reaction to COVID-19 news on social media in Portugal. arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07689.
Öndero˘glu, E. (2019). The ends justify the means in purging critical media. BIA Media Monitoring Reports. https://bianet.org/5/100/218959-the-ends-justify-themeans-
in-purging-critical-media.
Orwell, G. (2000). 1984. Penguin Books.
Özçelik, P. (2011). 12 Eylül’ü Anlamak. Ankara Üniversitesi SBF Dergisi, 66(1), 73-93.
Rid, T. (2020). Active measures: The secret history of disinformation and political warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sarıo˘glu, I. (2017). The september events: The anti-greek riots of 1955 in Istanbul. The Journal of International Civilization Studies, 2(1).
Schmitt, C. (2007). The concept of the political: Expanded edition. University of Chicago Press.
Sheridan, A. (2005). Michel Foucault: The will to truth. Routledge.
Shu, K., Bhattacharjee, A., Alatawi, F., Nazer, T., Ding, K., Karami, M., & Liu, H. (2020). Combating disinformation in a social media age. WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.07388.
Sönmez, M. (2010). Medya Çatırdıyor, Dip Dalga Gerçe˘gi Arıyor. bianet. https://m.b ianet.org/bianet/print/119242-medya-catirdiyor-dip-dalga-gercegi-ariyor.
Sunay, C. (2009). 12 Eylül Dönemi Türk Siyasetinde Sivil-Asker ˙Ili¸skileri 1980–1987. [Doctoral dissertation] Marmara University. https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/yonetilen-tez/8439ece2-2f9f-40b8-8798-1371960856eb/12-eylul-turk-siyasetinde-sivil-asker-iliskileri1980-1987.
Taylor, P. (1992). War and the media: Propaganda and persuasion in the Gulf War. Manchester University Press.
Tehranian, M. (2004). War, media, and propaganda: An epilogue. In R. Kamalipour & N. Snow (Eds.), War, media, and propaganda: A global perspective (pp. 237-242). Rowman&Littlefield.
Tucker, J., Guess, A., Barberá, P., Vaccari, C., Siegel, A., Sanovich, S., Stukal, D., & Nyhan, B. (2018). Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature. Hewlett Foundation. https://hewlett.org/library/social-media-political-polarization-political-disinformation-review-scientific-literature/.
Waisbord, S. (2018). The elective affinity between post-truth communication and populist politics. Communication Research and Practice, 4(1), 17-34.
Wettstein, M., Esser, F., Schulz, A., Wirz, D., & Wirth, W. (2018). News media as gatekeepers, critics, and initiators of populist communication: How journalists in ten countries deal with the populist challenge. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(4), 476-495.
Yıldırım, A., & ¸Sim¸sek, H. (2016). Sosyal bilimlerde nitel ara¸stırma yöntemleri. Seçkin yayıncılık.
Yılmaz, F. (2012). Right-wing hegemony and immigration: How the populist farright achieved hegemony through the immigration debate in Europe. Current sociology, 60(3) 368-381.
Zizek, S. (s.d.). How to watch the news with Slavoj Žižek, Episode 3, Fake News. RT international news channel. www.rt.com/shows/how-watch-news-with-slavojzizek/454423-fake-news-truth-lie.
