The Media treatment of the "Three Children" Discourse of Turkish Prime Minister in Media Texts

It is seen that the population policies which appear as efforts to control the population may vary depending on the location and the strategies of the countries that they had in the course of history. The population policies in Turkey from the beginning of the republic until 1965 called for an increase in population, but after that year the policies demanded that population be brought under control by reducing the population growth rate. Today it is claimed again that the population should increase. According to data of the Turkish Statistical Institute, the population of Turkey is expected to increase at a slow rate until 2050 and reach its highest point in 2050 with 93,475, 575 people. Expected to start decreasing by 2050, the population is anticipated to fall down to 89,172,088 in 2075. If current trends in demographic indicators remain the same way, it is predicted that population in Turkey will continue ageing. This situation is marked as a problematic issue by the government; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the leader of Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Prime Minister advices that each family have at least three children. This study is intended to put forward how the discourse of “three children” of the prime minister was presented in media texts and what kind of discourses were produced out of the three children discourse. The texts that were taken up for this analysis are all newspaper columns. Columns of four national and daily newspapers with different ideologies (Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Sabah, Yeni Şafak) were analyzed with a time period from the year 2008 when the prime minister started this discourse of three children until today. In the study, critical discourse analysis was used in an effort to point out how the discourse of “three children” of the prime minister was depicted in newspaper columns and the types of discourse that were generated through this issue in the same columns. Critical discourse analysis provides important data in bring out the ideologies that are re-produced by way of discourse in media texts, in determining around what themes any given subject is presented in media discourse, and finally in identifying the relationships between media-government-ideology and discourse by way of analyzing ideological representation through texts.