Does social media reduce 'corporate media influence' on journalism?: The Case of Turkish Media

Abstract

McChesney described one of the biggest problem of journalism as “the journalists have any power to be autonomous from owners and advertisers” (2008:58). Most of media market have been dominated by a few media companies, furthermore a few media conglomerates who had expanded with merger and acquisitions transactions control the biggest part of the global media and entertainment industry. This concentration of media power and penetration of commercial interest in the news media has been seen as affecting the mode of news, profession of journalism and outputs, and consequently, diversity and democracy itself. research aims to examine the potential of social media to create autonomous spaces for journalists working under the commercial pressure of their corporation. In order to analyze this new kind of news area for journalism, three different qualitative methods are used in different steps of research. First, social media utterances of popular journalists were observed to reveal their journalistic intention and they were also evaluated using two case stud- ies about social events which had been tweeted multiple times for many Turkish users (trending topics) in Twitter’s agenda. After diversifying the sample, different types of journalists’ social media experiments, including their responsibility to corporations, were examined by qualitative methods including in-depth interviews. Our findings show that although interactions between the journalists and audience observably changed, Twitter, as with other social networks, didn’t diminish the influence of corporate interests on journalism in Turkish media organisations.