Dış Politikada Kamuoyu Oluşumu: Türkiye-Hollanda Diplomatik Gerginliğinin Hürriyet, Sabah ve Sözcü Gazetelerindeki Sunumunun İncelenmesi

Abstract

The period in which academic interests intensify on the concept of public opinion on a controversial issue is observed to be in parallel with the period in which migration from villages to cities accelerate and mass societies begin to emerge. During the same period, the concept also gained importance in political life. At the moment, all powers have to take into account the element of public opinion when making decisions both in domestic policy and in foreign policy. Public opinion has an importance on domestic policy as well as on foreign policy in terms of influencing decisions. Mass media play an important role in establishing, informing, and spreading the public opinion.The purpose of this study is to analyze the diplomatic tension between the Netherlands and Turkey, which arose beginning on the first days of March 2017 and became a full-blown crisis on March 10th and 11th, through discourse analysis of newspapers’ headlines on the axis of mass media, public opinion, and foreign policy. For this purpose, the discourse analysis model of Teun A. Van Dijk was used and the front pages of Hürriyet, Sabah, and Sözcü newspapers were analyzed starting from March 12th, 2017 on which the incident appeared on press to April 17th, 2017, on which first unofficial results of Constitutional Amendment Referendum of April 16th were announced to the public. The findings of this study suggest that newspapers display an ideological bias rather than informing the public about foreign policy.