OPERATION COVİD-19: NEGATIVE AFFECTIVE LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC MANIPULATIONS IN THE HEADLINES OF THE NEWS ARTICLES ABOUT TURKEY BY THE NEWS PLATFORMS BROADCASTING IN TURKISH

Abstract

As an evolved tool of operation, human language includes new elements, techniques,and practices, such as (pre)judgments, emotions, subjectivity, positive-negative values, valences, and attitudes of speakers and authors. With these features, language creates an illusion between information, reality, news-reporting,and virtual reality, perception,and manipulation. Therefore, language cannot be regarded only as a communication tool that we can define as objective or neutral, but a communication and operation tool loaded with political, cultural,and ideological values. One field in which language is most effectively used as a menas of operation is media. This study analyzes the language and discourse used in the headlines of the news produced by the Voice of America Turkish, the Independent Turkish and Deutsche Welle Turkish media organizations during the Covid 19 pandemic. The study concluded that the headlines obtained as data used a negative affective language, which is the most prominent feature of political and ideological discourse. By using the permutation technique, which is a syntactic manipulation type, the word Turkey was used as the first word of most of the negative sentences. Rhetorical questions containing innuendos were widely used, creating negative perceptions to persuade the target audience to think, believe and act in the selected and desired way. The study argues that the headlines in question were the more biased openings of the biased media contents.