The structural features of the Turkish media were explained within the framework of Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) Theory of Comparative Media Systems as aligning with the Polarized Pluralist (Mediterranean) Model, and scholars have mostly focused on the growing press–party parallelism in Turkey following the rise to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 (Çarkoğlu & Yavuz, 2010; Yıldırım et al., 2021). However, considering the political process in Turkey in recent years, it is evident that the pluralist polarized model in Turkish media has been significantly influenced by media capture. Especially after 2011, the Turkish government has increasingly adopted an authoritarian orientation within a neoliberal and Islamist framework, and the AKP has implemented media capture strategies to cultivate a media environment aligned with its interests (Yeşil, 2018).
Of course, media in Turkey was under pressure almost in all periods and this caused Turkey to never rank well in the freedom of media lists. Moreover, since AKP’s taking over the government, all the achievements of democracy and freedom in the country were almost destroyed. There are many reports documenting threats, attacks, detentions, and lawsuits against journalists, including press freedom indexes published by Freedom House, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The news and reports about the pressures against the media after the 15th of July 2016 the coup attempt, show how insecure the country has become in terms of journalism (Ataman & Çoban, 2019).
Increasing authoritarianism, together with the accompanying media polarization, has profoundly affected the field of journalism, which has resulted in the creation of a media atmosphere dominated by pro-government media outlets due to authoritarian repression. This dominance is worrying regarding freedom of expression, as a group of opposition and independent media continue to exist under severe pressure (Somer, 2019). Media polarization in Turkey is part of the government’s political strategies to protect and consolidate its power. It is based on the effort to legitimize authoritarian policies through the effective use of the media in the eyes of the public. The government pressures or encourages media organizations to give up their oppositional identities, ignore social problems, and/or support themselves; otherwise, it tries to neutralize them through various visible or invisible sanctions. The government is implementing various legal regulations and trying to de-functionalize all financial resources that feed the media to neutralize and suppress social opposition. The pressure on the opposition and independent media has intensified in political, financial, and legal dimensions (Kaptan, 2020).
Throughout Turkey’s political and press history, long-established and national newspapers with strong ties to a centrist-nationalist orientation have always maintained their presence. Until the 1980s, a distinction between sensationalist mass media and quality press existed based on certain criteria. Daily newspapers such as Hürriyet and Cumhuriyet, have consistently been regarded as more serious and high-quality publications across different periods (Barutçu, 2004). However, as a result of the media capture mentioned above, the Turkish media has drifted away from the pluralistic side outlined in Hallin and Mancini’s model (Akser & Baybars, 2024).
Based on the prediction that media-state parallelism will influence political discourse in the context of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we selected two newspapers and conducted a comprehensive analysis of their coverage, including commentaries and opinion columns. In this study, we proposed Hürriyet as a high parallelism and Cumhuriyet as a counter-parallelism newspaper, among Turkey’s most influential newspapers representing different ends of the media-political parallelism spectrum. After being acquired by the Demirören Group in 2018, Hürriyet‘s liberal and secular stance shifted significantly toward a closer alignment with the ruling AKP and President Erdoğan, and the newspaper has demonstrated high political parallelism since then (Akser, 2025). On the other hand, Cumhuriyet, as an opposition newspaper, stands as one of Turkey’s most prominent critical voices against the pro-government media (Çarkoğlu et al. 2014). As a result, Cumhuriyet has faced significant legal and political pressures. Despite these challenges, it maintains an independent editorial voice and advocates for secularism and democracy.
References
Akser, M. (2025). De-democratization of Turkish Media: A New Century of Opposition and Resistance?. In P. Kubicek (Ed.), Paths of De-democratization in Turkey (pp. 75-89). Peter Lang.
Akser, M., & Baybars, B. (2024). Media Systems and Media Capture in Turkey: A Case Study. Media and Communication, 12. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.7733
Ataman, B. & Çoban, B. (2019). Turkey: How to deal with threats to journalism?. In E. Elde, K. S. Orgeret & N. Mutluer (Eds.), Transnational Othering Global Diversities: Media, Extremisim and Free Expression (pp. 71-190). Nordicom. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1535700/FULLTEXT01.pdf.
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Kaptan, Y. (2020). Authoritarian Populism and the Discourse of “the People” in the Turkish Islamist Media: The Case of Yeni Şafak. International Journal Of Communication, 14(19). 3986-4002.
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Yıldırım, K., Baruh, L., & Çarkoğlu, A. (2020). “Dynamics of Campaign Reporting and Press-Party Parallelism: Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism and the Media System in Turkey”, Political Communication, 38(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1765913.