Political Bias in a Turkish Political TV Interview

The study aims to provide empirical data on the question of partiality in political TV interviews in Turkey. The model developed by Clayman and Heritage (2002) and Clayman et al. (2007) and extended by Huls and Varwijk (2011) is used to analyze questions asked by interviewers in the political TV discussion program Siyaset Meydanı to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The initial 30-minute parts of each interview have been examined to reveal aggressive question designs and the results are evaluated in comparison to each other in terms of possible bias favoring or disfavoring one of the politicians. The conclusion is that though it is hard to make distinctions regarding the other five measures – initiative, directness, assertiveness, adversarialness, accountability and persistence – interviewers seem to be partial in terms of assertiveness that they utilize in their questions, favoring Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and disfavoring Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.