“What’s the news about the elections?”: framing of the news media during the general elections of 2023 in Türkiye

Media coverage is a sort of connection between citizens and political information. Different news forms or interpretations lead readers to the content and opinions. Electoral campaigns are touchstones in media framing through storytelling of salient issues and narratives. This study considers Türkiye as part of a polarized pluralist media system and scrutinizes how media columnists narrated/framed and reproduced the elections and campaigns of 2023. The article seeks to examine interpretative journalism’s meaning-making within a salient contextualization, through opinion writing. The column-based investigation focuses on four newspapers, elaborating on two columnists from each and coding 166 columns in MAXQDA. The major findings demonstrate that columnists serve to provide direct parallelism and blaming others for polarization or negativities. Additionally, there are different articulations of populism, personalization, and views on electoral context. The integration of negative campaigning is a crosscut but emotional appeal differs between such feelings as pride (pro-government) and anger (opposition).