A Whole New Ball Game or Not? A Comparative Analysis on the Content of the Print Media News and Tweets Circling the 2015 Turkish Elections

The power of the Internet is becoming more and more crucial in political campaigning. In spite of this, the number of studies comparing the content of traditional sources (such as print media news) and social media content (such as Facebook and Twitter) is, at best, scarce. As an attempt to fulfil this niche, this study will utilize two theoretical approaches of political communication, namely negativity and civility. Accordingly, it will carry out a comparative analysis on the tone (i.e. positive or negative) and civility (i.e. civil or uncivil) of the tweets and newspaper news by utilizing a new dataset, which covers the two most recent elections in Turkey. Although the literature on negative campaigning has been growing in the US, Europe and beyond, to the knowledge of the author no comparison has yet been made on the similarities and differences between the conventional modes of media and Twitter use within the scope of negativity studies. Apart from this aspect, the civility/incivility dimension of the messages will also be analysed. Similar to the negativity literature, civility literature is mostly on the context of conventional media, ranging from print media news to TV debates. Although more recent research on the issue happens to spill over to the content on the Internet - like blogospheres – those undertaking similar discussions on Twitter as the sole medium, are non-existent. With this in mind, the present study aims to compare the traditional and new sources of public opinion formation by utilizing the theories of political communication. It is hoped that this comparison, upon revealing the similarities and differences, will open up new possibilities for further research, given the increasing role of the Internet and social networking sites in mass media and politics.