Content Analysis of Foreign Media Agencies’ Social Media Shares in the Pandemic Process: BBC Turkish, DW Turkish, and Independent Turkish Examples

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic disease has affected the whole world in 2020. This process, which countries aim to overcome with the least damage by struggling with different strategies, has received the attention of public opinion on a global scale. Through early measures and its robust public policy, Turkey has been one of the most successful countries in fighting the epidemic, such as Germany and South Korea. The media undoubtedly has played an important role in communicating the threat posed by the pandemic and the associated risk factors. Among these, social media provides a data source worth studying in terms of risk communication due to its increasing number of users and its power to influence society and politics. Therefore, the present study investigates Twitter messages of the Turkish accounts of the BBC, the Deutsche Welle, and the Independent shared between March-10 April 2020. The data obtained from the relevant accounts were coded according to a coding table obtained in previous risk communication studies and containing factors specific to the COVID-19 outbreak, and the findings were analyzed by content analysis method. It is one of the most important findings of the study that while a significant part of the messages shared by the relevant accounts in the early stages of the pandemic has the function of informing the society, a remarkable part of them is for political criticism.