Media Publicity of Civil Society Organizations in Turkey

This research explores media publicity of civil society organizations focusing on news published by the Turkish media. The data were obtained from 19 news portals, including dailies and Turkish news released by international media outlets between December 1, 2016 and June 1, 2017. News about associations/foundations was selected and analyzed by corpus linguistic methods. There were 4,883 news about associations/foundations out of 410,937 news. The news portals which published most of this news were Milli Gazete, Birgun, and Yeni Safak. There was at least one news for a total of 1,221 associations/foundations; therefore, only 1% was represented in the news papers, indicating limited media publicity. Another finding was the low proportion of these in newspapers with high circulation, such as Hurriyet, Sabah, and Haberturk. The top 10 were the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, associations/foundations closed after the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, the Anadolu Youth Association, the Ensar Foundation, the Turkish Maarif Foundation, the Aladag Student Support Association, the Turkiye Diyanet Foundation, the Human Rights Association, the Turkish Youth Foundation, and the Furkan Foundation. Therefore, the media's political stance affects which associations/foundations are visible in the news.