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

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.