CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Gürsoy, Kaan Muharrem |
|---|---|
| Title | Pride, Nostalgia, and Fury: Exploring Representations of Contemporary Politics in Entertainment Television |
| Summary | This thesis explores representations of political issues and actors in entertainment television as well as the audience’s reaction to such content. While the majority of scholarly works in Political Communication neglects entertainment content, the limited research on convergence between entertainment television and politics identifies various ways of potential influence including the content of the narrative, the characteristics of the audience, and the cognitive processing. This research focuses on the first one, the content, and argues that the plots, characters, and motifs employed by television dramas are able to reflect political actors and issues, and to facilitate public political discussions, albeit the motivation behind their consumption is entertainment. Further, this may get intensified in places where television viewing levels are significantly high and where politics is able to permeate into private spheres. To test this claim, this study conducts a thematic analysis of two recent dramas from Turkey and online comments to these series by the audience. The analysis of the series and comments indicates that in Turkey, political events and actors find large representation in entertainment television and the political relevance of these portrayals are acknowledged by the audiences. Therefore, this research demonstrates that just like news programming, entertainment television is able to generate serious media effects and influence public discussion of politics. |
| Supervisor | Lup, Oana |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/gursoy_kaan.pdf |
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