The 2014 Turkish Municipal Elections Under the Impact of the December 17 Process

During the course of a political communication process, political actors employ various communication techniques which are developed towards various goals. Particularly election times see a concentration and polarization in political communication actions on various media, but the press maintains still a most strategic role. The aim of this study is to explore the potential of the Turkish press for the projection of the relations between the Ak Party and the Hizmet Cemaati -The Community of Service as it was covered by the headlines on political events during the elections period. Five newspapers with differing political stances were chosen and their news coverage of the last thirty days before the elections was studied in relation to their genre and type, attributes, and definition of meaning. Then, the news coverage was qualitatively content analyzed in comparison to each other. The obtained data was was put to qualitative content analysis used for an analysis of the attitude that the Turkish press presented on the relationship of Ak party-The Community after the December 17 operations in light of the political communication. The analysis exposed clearly that each newspaper was occupied to cover the news according to her engaged ideology and political stance.