Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International
Journal
ISSN: 1080-7039 (Print) 1549-7860 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/bher20
Content Analysis of Printed News Media Related to
Drowning Incidents in Turkey
Mehmet Işik & Şakir Eşitti
To cite this article: Mehmet Işik & Şakir Eşitti (2015) Content Analysis of Printed News Media Related to Drowning Incidents in Turkey, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International Journal, 21:4, 1050-1061, DOI: 10.1080/10807039.2014.953373
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10807039.2014.953373
Accepted author version posted online: 14 Aug 2014.
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CopyrightTaylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1080-7039 print / 1549-7860 online DOI: 10.1080/10807039.2014.953373
Content Analysis of Printed News Media Related
to Drowning Incidents in Turkey
Mehmet Is¸ik1,∗
and S¸akir Es¸itti2
1Interior Ministry, Ankara, Turkey;2Department of Political Science and Public
Administration, Ardahan University, Ardahan, Turkey
ABSTRACT
Drowning is a major public health problem in Turkey as it is for other countries. According to the latest statistics, the annual average number of people who drowned in the rivers, lakes, or seas of Turkey is 642. An examination of the language and the presentation style that the media use while covering the news about drowning cases may help us to determine the risk factors of the drowning cases and reduce the number. This study aims to show the awareness level of the Turkish print media on preventing drowning incidents and to discuss the steps to be taken in the Turkish media in order to prevent drowning. To this end, attitudes and presentations of three best-selling newspapers in Turkey—Zaman, Posta, and H¨urriyet—and a less-selling one, Cumhuriyet, were studied in accordance with the content analysis method. The results show that the awareness of the Turkish media to prevent drowning incidents is inadequate. The number of drowning cases covered by these newspapers are very few, and they emphasis the forensic aspect of the incidents by using dramatic language without background information.
Key Words: health communication, drowning, drowning incidents, news, content analysis.
INTRODUCTION
Death caused by drowning in water has been a major public health problem for humanity for ages. Early civilizations started around water. The closer people built their first settlements to water, the closer they came to it. Therefore, drowning cases have continued around the same places throughout history, as Bierens (2006) stated “Water brings life, water takes life; burial follows.”
First attempts to reduce drowning cases started in the 18th century. The first voluntary society, Maatschappij tot Redding van Drenkelingen (Society to Rescue
Received 5 February 2014; revised manuscript accepted 6 August 2014.
∗Current affiliation: Department of Cinema and Television, Faculty of Fine Arts, Batman
University, Batman, Turkey
Address correspondence to Mehmet Is¸ik, Department of Cinema and Television, Faculty of Fine Arts, Batman University, Batman, Turkey. E-mail: mehmet.isik@batman.edu.tr
People from Drowning), was founded in The Netherlands in 1767 with the goal to lower the number of drowning incidents and promote the resuscitation of drowned people. The publication of the Handbook on Drowning provides a good opportunity for a brief history of the Society. France, Russia, Austria, England, Switzerland, and Denmark showed a great interest as well as the cities of Venice, Hamburg, and New York, where similar societies were also soon created (Bierens 2006).
Drowning was recognized as a major public health problem by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project undertaken by the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), which released the first study at the end of the 1990s. The project showed that drowning is one of the most common causes among injury-related deaths worldwide (Murray and Lopez 1997; Rahman et al. 2009; Van Beeck et al. 2005). This project was followed by the World Congress on Drowning, June 26–29, 2002, held in Amsterdam as a result of the attempts of Maatschappij tot Redding van Drenkelingen with more than 500 participants from more than 40 countries joining in an intensive program.
According to the statistics of the WHO, drowning is the third leading cause of deaths in the world. Seven percent of all the injury-related deaths are caused by drowning; in other words, approximately 388,000 fatal drowning cases occur annually in the world (WHO 2012). This number does not include the death toll caused by the tsunamis, ship accidents, or any other natural disasters. According to Bierens et al. (2012), the actual number of drowning deaths is predicted to be much higher than the reported number.
According to the WHO, the drowning incidence is the third biggest death cause in the world after traffic and home accidents. An increasing percentage of death by water in infancy and teenage years is a leading cause of worldwide death especially among boys from 5 to 14 years old (WHO 2006). Ninety-six percent of drowning-related death cases occur in the low- and middle-income countries (WHO 2012). In the United States, drowning is the second leading cause of injury-related death among 1- to 4-year-old children with a death rate of 3 per 100,000. In many African and Central American countries, the incidence of drowning is 10 to 20 times higher than the incidence in the United States. Key risk factors for drowning are male sex, less than 14 years old, alcohol use, low income, poor education, rural residency, risky behavior (entering the sea without knowing how to swim or not having the rescue equipment, etc.), and lack of supervision (ILS 2007; WHO 2012; Bierens et al. 2012).
Starting from the primitive ages, Anatolian1civilizations have built their
settle-ments next to the banks of seas, rivers, and at the seaside. Hence, drowning cases have become part of their daily life. Avramidis (2010), who studied the drowning cases in literary works, has found out that these deaths were common even in mytho-logical and ancient times. A mosaic illustration dating back to 1237 BC shows the king of Aleppo held his head down by two helpers just as he was rescued from the Orontes River (Heldring 2006), which clearly verifies that drowning incidents have a long history in Anatolia and the neighbouring regions. Although drownings have a long history in Turkey, the number of scientific works is limited, and the
1Editor’s note: Anatolian denotes the westernmost protrusion of Asia, which makes up the
interest in the field is low. There is also not enough healthy statistical information on the subject. Furthermore, reliability of the available statistical information kept by different institutions is questionable due to their inconsistencies. For instance, according to a publication of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TU˙IK 2008), annually, on average, 140 people lose their lives due to drowning.
However, Turgut and Turgut (2013) reported that in their population-based re-search covering online re-search engines and daily newspapers belonging to January 1, 2007–December 31, 2011, that 3216 persons (84.0%, 2703 males; 16.0%, 513 females) died in Turkey due to drowning within the same period (2007–2011). In other words, the annual death toll in Turkey due to drowning was 642. The re-sults Turgut and Turgut (2013) reached seem to be much closer to real numbers than that of the TUIK. While 94 and 70 persons in 2007 and 2008, respectively, seem to have died by either drowning or bogging according to TUIK’s statistics (2008), the Gendarmerie District alone had the numbers 58 and 48 for the same years according to 2011 data from the Istanbul Gendarmerie Command. The fact that Turkey has 81 provinces together with Istanbul can give a clue about the dis-crepancy of TUIK statistics. Turgut and Turgut’s (2013) statistics seems much more realistic considering the little Gendarmerie area in Istanbul, let alone the larger police area.
Another important result of this research is that the sex and age are the primary risk factors. Persons 1–19 years old are the most risky group (Turgut and Turgut 2013). This result is consistent with WHO (2003) and other scientific sources in the world. Kiakalayeh et al. (2008) found that almost half the victims (46%) were younger than 19, and 74% of all victims were under 30. Sheikhazadi and Ghadyani (2009) found that 73.8% of all victims were under the age of 24 years. Turgut (2011) found in his study about multiple drowning incidents that 48.4% of “rescuers” and 80% of primary drowning victims were younger than 19 years.
METHODOLOGY
Drowning is an important social health problem and the main aim of this study is to portray the reflection of drowning cases in the Turkish newspapers in order to see whether media play or can play a role in preventing drownings or not. This study analyzed the four best-selling newspapers in Turkey—Zaman, Posta, H¨urriyet, and Cumhuriyet—selected on the basis of their circulation figures, ideological views, and perspectives. Furthermore, according to the Press Advertisement Institution’s (B˙IK) March 2013 statistics, three of Turkey’s best-selling newspapers are Zaman (1,079,777), Posta (477,011), and H¨urriyet (425,494). Among the less selling news-papers, Cumhuriyet, which is chosen due to its longer history and ideological per-spective, has a daily sale of 50,119 (B˙IK, March 2013).
Zaman is chosen as the main representative of the conservative media, which has a moderate Islamic worldview. It has a democratic Islamic viewpoint in politics and has a conservative stance in social and cultural context (Alver 2011). H¨urriyet and Posta are chosen as representatives of mainstream liberal, populist media. They follow the popular line in their pages. Finally, Cumhuriyet is chosen as the representative of
left-wing media. It has a left Kemalist2publication policy defending the Republican
philosophy based on Kemalist principles and secularism (Alver 2011).
Content analysis was taken as the appropriate analysis methodology for this re-search. A total of 170 drowning-related news articles were coded and analyzed. Content analysis is a method that involves the quantifying of certain elements within both written and visual texts, and is commonly defined as an objective, systematic, and quantitative discovery of media content. In the present study, content analysis was conducted on both written and visual texts. During the work, the news arti-cles of the aforementioned four newspapers related to drowning incidents at sea, lakes, rivers, and the public pools between 2007 and 2012 summer months (June 15–August 31) were investigated. The death cases in water that are related to traffic and work accidents such as falling into the sea, lakes, rivers, irrigation channels, and ditches with water as a result of motor vehicle accidents and refugees and fugitives in sinking ships were not included in the research, since these incidents are accidents and beyond the scope of this research, which has examined the drowning incidents related to swimming.
EVALUATION OF THE FINDINGS OBTAINED FROM THE ZAMAN , POSTA,
H ¨URRIYET , AND CUMHURIYET NEWSPAPERS
Findings According to the Number of News Articles
Since the number of the news articles, be it more or fewer, in a newspaper shows the degree of importance that a newspaper attaches to an issue, it is defined as an analytical category. Therefore, we have tried to evaluate the interest shown in drowning incidents by the four newspapers using the number of the news articles they released within the period covering our research.
The scanning of Zaman, Posta, H¨urriyet, and Cumhuriyet newspapers published between June 15, 2007 and August 31, 2012 yielded 170 news articles on drowning cases; 19 of these were in Zaman, 88 in Posta, 38 in H¨urriyet, and 25 were in Cumhuriyet. As mentioned above in Turgut and Turgut (2013), the annual drowning death toll in Turkey is 642. However, from the number of news articles published in the four newspapers, it is evident that Turkish written media pay very little attention to drowning cases. The research has not excluded the repeated drowning cases in these newspaper articles. During this period, for instance, Zaman published only 19 articles and Cumhuriyet published 25 articles for the 642 drowning deaths. News article number analysis has brought out the result that, with 118 articles, Posta was the newspaper allocating the largest place to drowning cases. This was an unexpected result considering the interest of Zaman and Cumhuriyet to social issues in their newspapers. Also, newspapers do not examine the actual reasons of drowning cases and take it as a social problem in their articles; instead, they pay more attention to the personal side of incidents such as the drama and misery of the families of the drowned people. Therefore, according to the number of articles (170 total),
2Editor’s note: Kemalism (Turkish: Kemalizm) is the founding ideology of Turkey. Kemalism
newspapers mostly ignore the drowning cases, since they do not even publish any news about most of the cases.
Findings Related to the Page Priority of the News Articles Published
The page of the newspaper on which the news articles was published is another criterion to show the priority and importance that a newspaper attributes to the news articles in question. Therefore, it is accepted as another analytic category in newspaper evaluations. In this sense we had to investigate drowning news introduced in these four papers with different publishing lines and strategies to reveal the significance they ascribe to drowning incidents.
This category requires an investigation of newspapers by dividing their pages into four groups: the most important front page, which includes news articles about crucial issues or scandalous events; back page with secondary priority; third page for paparazzi and tabloid issues; and all other inside pages as the fourth group.
Page priority category analysis on these four newspapers showed that of the total 170 news, 9 were on the first pages, 85 on the third pages, 1 was on the back page, and 75 were on the other pages of the newspapers; out of the 19 news articles that were published in Zaman, 4 were on the third page, 15 of them were on the other pages; out of the 88 news articles published in Posta, 6 were on the front page, 51 on the third page, 1 on the back cover, and 30 were on the other pages; out of the 38 drowning news articles published in Cumhuriyet, 2 were on the front page, 27 on the third page, and 9 were on the inside pages.
According to the results of the analysis, among these four newspapers, Posta was the first to carry the news on its front page 6 times, and once (1) on the back page. H¨urriyet followed it by placing drowning news articles on its front page twice. Cumhuriyet and Zaman were the least to allocate place for drowning incidents on their front pages. While the former opened its front page once, the latter never placed drowning news on its first page.
Another result of the analysis was that the four papers had considerable differ-ences in their allocation of pages according to types of news. While Posta and H¨urriyet brought out the dramatic, sensational, and forensic aspects of the drowning prob-lem by carrying the news articles on their third pages, Zaman and Cumhuriyet had a strategy to publish the related news articles on different pages. A further inter-esting finding was that in both Posta and H¨urriyet, drowning incidents and news articles about them were generally juxtaposed with the news articles about sexual harassment, prostitution, extortion, burglary, and similar events.
Findings Related to the Dimension of the News
Since the size of the news article and the place it occupies in a newspaper gives us hints about the attitude and stance of that newspaper toward the issue published, news articles dimension is identified as another analytic category in newspaper evalu-ations. Therefore, we have examined and compared these four different newspapers to see how much significance they attach to drowning incidents.
Their news articles were investigated and divided into four groups as headlines, sub-headlines, small news, and large news. If an area of news covered in a newspaper
is bigger than one-fourth of the writing area then it’s large news, and if smaller, than it’s called small news.
In this sense, out of 170 news articles belonging to all papers, 3 were headlines, 97 were small news, 70 were large news; out of the 19 news articles that Zaman published, 13 were small news, 6 were large news; out of the 88 news articles that Posta published, 2 were headlines, 37 were small news, and 49 were large news; out of the 38 news articles that H¨urriyet published, 24 were small news, 13 were large news; out of the 25 news articles that Cumhuriyet published, 23 were small news and 2 were large news.
The analysis made clear that, while the Posta newspaper publishes the related news about the drowning cases with larger fonts and titles in large sizes, H¨urriyet, Zaman, and Cumhuriyet chose to give them in small titles and sizes. The sizes of the news articles published in Cumhuriyet and Zaman especially were much smaller than those in Posta and H¨urriyet.
Findings Related to the Use of Visual Materials
While, on one hand, publishing the news articles with a photograph makes it much more readable, on the other hand it always has the potential to distract the readers due to any distortion or incongruity between the picture and content of the news. However, using pictures together with the news articles is another distinguishing analytic category in this type of research. We have compared and evaluated the news articles of the four papers based on their presentation of the news and pictures.
The scanning of all the news articles showed that 45 news articles (26%) out of 170 total had no photographs at all, 55 (32%) of them had big lettering, but small photographs, 54 (32%) of them had big photographs, but small lettering, 16 (9.6%) of them had compatible photographs and lettering; out of the 19 news articles published in Zaman, 10 (53%) had no photographs, 7 (37%) had big lettering with small photographs, 1 (5%) had a big photograph, but lettering, and 1 (5%) of them had equal photograph and writing size; out of the 88 news articles published by Posta, 4 (4.5%) had no photographs, 30 (34%) had big lettering, but small photographs, 44 (50%) had big photographs, but small lettering, 10 (22.7%) had equal photographs and writing size; out of the 38 news articles published in H¨urriyet, 11 (29%) had no photographs, 12 (31.5%) had big lettering, but small photograph, 10 (26%) had big photograph, but small lettering, 5 (13%) of them had equal photographs and writing size; out of the 25 news articles published in Cumhuriyet, 20 (80%) had no photographs, and 5 (20%) had big lettering, but small photographs.
Publishing the news generally with colorful, big photographs mostly on the third page, and bringing out the dramatic and criminal aspects of the incidents, which is often preferred by Posta more than the others, can be interpreted as a hindrance for the revelation of the economic and social causes underlying the main issue.
Furthermore, actors in the photographs give some hints about the newspapers investing in this subject. As of this reason the news articles and the photographs related to the drowning cases published in the same papers were investigated ac-cording to whom the actors were: regular people, lifeguards, police/gendarmerie, and persons not encoded.
The scanning showed that, out of 170 news articles 44 (26%) had no photographs; of the 126 news articles published with photographs, 111 (88%) had regular people as actors, 13 (10.3%) had lifeguards, and 1 had police or gendarmerie.
The analysis shows that the regular people covered much more space on the pages of all newspapers, while the lifeguards and divers who are important to the search, rescue, and prevention activities had almost no photographs.
Findings Related to Topics of the News Articles
Since the topic of news is significant in understanding how that issue is handled, subject-matter of news articles is considered as another analytic category. For this reason, using this analytic category we have tried to determine the content agenda of these four different newspapers to see what their topics are and how they present drowning incidents.
News scanning of the newspapers revealed that, out of 145 news articles that could be encoded, 75 (51%) were deaths due to drowning in the sea, 31 (21%) were deaths due to drowning in lakes, 14 (10%) were deaths while trying to save drowning victims, 13 (9%) were successful saving stories, and 12 (8%) were arti-cles only about the prevention aspect of the incidents; out of the 18 encoded news articles published in Zaman, 8 (44%) were deaths because of drowning in the sea, 2 (11%) were because of drowning in lakes, 2 (11%) were deaths during rescue attempts, 1 (5%) was a successful saving story, and 5 (28%) were about preven-tion activities; out of the 71 encoded news articles published in Posta, 41 (58%) were deaths because of drowning in the sea, 14 (20%) were deaths due to drown-ing in lakes, 6 (8%) were deaths while savdrown-ing, 18 (25%) were successful savdrown-ing stories, and 2 (3%) were about prevention activities; out of the 33 encoded news articles published in H¨urriyet, 14 (42%) were deaths caused by drowning in the sea, 9 (27%) were deaths because of drowning in lakes, 4 (12%) were dying while saving, 4 (12%) were successful saving stories, and 2 (6%) were about prevention activities; out of the 23 encoded news articles published in Cumhuriyet, 12 (52%) were deaths by drowning in the sea, 6 (26%) were deaths because of drowning in lakes, 2 (8.7%) were dying while saving, and 3 (13%) were about prevention activities.
The analyses revealed that death by drowning in the sea was the news articles most frequently published; drowning in lakes, death while trying to save others, and successful saving stories followed it. The least published news articles were about prevention activities. Cumhuriyet and Zaman covered prevention activities more than
H¨urriyet and Posta, even though those two had much more news articles than the
formers about drowning cases in general. Scarcity of news articles related to preven-tion activities can be evaluated as a hindrance to the efforts to reduce the number of drowning incidents.
Findings Related to Characteristic Aspects of the News
Highlighted distinctive characteristics of the news related to an issue are as im-portant as the dimensions of the same news issue published in a newspaper. There-fore, evaluation of characteristics of news articles is identified as another analytic category. In this respect, we have analyzed the news articles in these four newspapers
to have an idea of which characteristics features of the incidents they favor during the process of news-making and publishing.
Our scanning yielded that 162 news articles were encoded under the heading of forensic, dramatic, and sensational (magazine). The news articles that focused more on the personal and tragic side of the incident were investigated under the category of dramatic news. The news articles that focused more on the law and order side of the incident were categorized under the heading of forensic, and the news articles that focused more on sensational side of the incidents such as the news related to celebrities or politicians were categorized under the heading of magazine news. According to the research 55 (26%) of these news articles were in forensic character, 81 (32%) were dramatic, 26 (16%) were magazine, 16 (10%) were providing background information; out of the 19 news articles published in Zaman, 12 (63%) had forensic character, 2 (10.5%) had a dramatic character, 5 (26%) were providing background information; out of the 87 encoded news articles published in Posta, 22 (25%) had forensic character, 49 (56%) had a dramatic character, 11 (13%) had magazine character, only 5 (6%) were in character to provide background information; out of the 35 encoded news articles published in
H¨urriyet, 6 (17%) were in forensic character, 25 (71%) had a dramatic character, 3
(8.5%) had magazine character, only 1 (3%) was providing background information; out of the 25 encoded news articles published in Cumhuriyet, 15 (60%) were forensic in character, 5 (20%) had a dramatic character, 5 (20%) were providing background information.
Analysis results showed that all the newspapers emphasized the forensic and dra-matic aspects of the news, and the number of the news articles providing background information was few. While the Posta newspaper covers the drowning news mostly in a dramatic and forensic way, H¨urriyet usually emphasizes the dramatic results of the incidents, and Cumhuriyet and Zaman are the newspapers providing more background information although they lag behind the former considering the total number of the news articles given.
Another interesting aspect of the news about drowning is the language of en-tertainment, which is usually introduced under tragicomic headings. The headings “Alive by Chance [Tesad ¨ufen Yas¸ıyor]” (Posta, August 1, 2012), “The Landscape Hits Hard [Manzara Fena C¸ arptı]” (Posta, August 16, 2012), “Inflatable Boat Blown Lost [Patlayan S¸is¸me Bot Kayboldu]” (H¨urriyet, July 4, 2007), “Fiance Falling from the Swimming Mattress Disappears [S¨ozl ¨us ¨u Deniz Yata˘gından D ¨us¸ ¨up Bo˘guldu]” (H¨urriyet, June 26, 2008), “Drowns with Swimming Armlets Fastened to Feet [Kol-lukları Aya˘gına Takınca Bo˘guldu]” (H¨urriyet, July 11, 2008) “Drowning Call Deemed as Larking [Bo˘guluyordu S¸aka Sandılar]” (Cumhuriyet, July 6, 2011) are some of the examples to support our view. This type of news publishing, such as illustrating drowning news in a humorous way to get the attention of their readers, prevents the main issue from being discussed publicly and closes the path to proposals for the solution because of the distraction. Since drowning is a public health problem, journalists, as part of their social responsibility missions, should handle this sort of news more seriously within a cause and effect relationship including the background of incidents.
Findings Related to the Focus of the News Articles
To understand how a problem is defined, another important aspect is what the focus of the news articles is, as well as the content and quality of it. Therefore, the actors focused on by the articles make another analytic category in our study. In this regard, we have tried to analyze these ideologically different papers to determine which actors they emphasize and which ones they ignore or push back during their news process pertaining to drowning.
The scanning of the newspapers taking the news actor category into consideration revealed that, out of 169 encoded news articles, 155 (92%) had the ordinary persons, 1 (0.6%) had police/gendarmerie, and 13 (7.6%) had lifeguards as their actors; out of the 19 news articles published in Zaman, 16 (63%) had ordinary persons, 1 (5%) had police/gendarmerie, and 2 (10%) had lifeguards as actors; out of the 87 encoded news articles published in Posta, 78 (90%) had ordinary persons and 9 (10%) had lifeguards; out of the 38 news articles published in H¨urriyet, 37 (97%) had ordinary persons and 1 (3%) had a lifeguard; out of the 25 news articles published in Cumhuriyet, 24 (96%) had ordinary persons and 1 (4%) had a lifeguard as the actor of the news.
The results put forth by the analysis were that almost all the actors of drowning related news articles published by Zaman, Posta, H¨urriyet, and Cumhuriyet were ordi-nary people, but actors like lifeguards, divers, and doctors who are expected to play a role in drowning incidents were hardly covered.
Moreover, features of the actors emphasized by the papers can give us some clues about the approach and stance of the newspapers concerning the issue at hand. To this end, emphasized features of the actors involved in drowning inci-dents were evaluated according to age, sex, occupation, nationality (usually tourists or citizens of other countries living in Turkey), and number of the actors in the news.
The scanning of the newspapers in this frame showed that, out of 129 encoded news articles, 72 (56%) emphasized the age, 12 (9%) the sex, 12 (9%) the occu-pation, 6 (4.6%) the nationality, and 12 (9%) the number of the actors; out of the encoded 15 news articles published in Zaman, 5 (33%) emphasized the age, 1 (6.6%) the sex, 3 (20%) the occupation, and 6 (40%) the number of the ac-tors; out of the encoded 66 news articles published in Posta, 43 (65%) emphasized the age, 3 (4.5%) the sex, 17 (25.7%) the occupation, 2 (3%) the nationality, and 1(1.5%) the number of the actors; out of the encoded 28 news articles pub-lished in H¨urriyet, 13 (46%) emphasized the age, 4 (14%) the sex, 6 (21%) the occupation, 4 (14%) the nationality, and 1(3.5%) the number of the actors; out of the encoded 20 news articles published in Cumhuriyet, 11 (55%) emphasized the age, 4 (20%) the sex, 1(5%) the occupation, and 6 (30%) the number of actors.
These results suggest that age seems to be the most prevalent feature empha-sized by all the newspapers. Zaman and Cumhuriyet dwelled on the number of the actors involved in the incidents more than the other papers. Another feature all the newspapers include is the age of the drowning people, whom, we see, are usually children.
Findings Related to the News Articles Providing Expert Views
Since the expertise and their views covered by the news articles related to espe-cially social issues renders the news articles more informative, didactic, and convinc-ing, it is also identified as an analytic category for research like this. We have aimed to determine to what extent these four different newspapers, within the context of their news, are interested in appealing to informing and guiding experts, which could be well conducive to reduction of such incidents.
The scanning carried out on the newspapers showed that, while 157 (92.4%) news articles out of the 170 total amount had no expert opinion, only 13 (7.6%) of them appealed to expert opinion.
Overall scrutiny revealed that newspapers in general did not appeal to expert opinion during their news process related to drowning cases. The newspapers pub-lishing the views of experts more than the others were Zaman and Cumhuriyet. Experts never did appear in Posta and H¨urriyet, which in fact always publish much more news articles than the others. One of the important functions of newspapers is to enlighten the public in certain matters by giving beneficial information together with the news content. Ignoring the scientific views that can enhance the proper attitude and behavior in case of drowning incidents can be evaluated as a great limitation of the newspapers.
CONCLUSION
As mentioned earlier, in this study drowning is analyzed as an important cause of death. According to WHO, drowning is the third leading cause of unintentional death worldwide. Also, according to relevant literature and the records, approxi-mately 642 people drown every year in Turkey, especially during the summer time. In addition, drowning is a leading cause of death among children and young peo-ple. Therefore, this study has seen drowning as a social health problem and tried to evaluate media’s publishing policy and stance toward drowning, aiming to promote media influence in preventing or, at least, reducing drowning. To this end, analysis and comparison of four ideologically different Turkish newspapers were made.
As a result of the research, it is revealed that there is no awareness in terms of preventing drowning within Turkish printed media. The analysis and comparison of the newspapers yielded that drowning incidents could not find enough place in these four newspapers except Posta. In the newspapers except Posta, the number of news articles was very few, and news articles dimensions were small. The pages of these newspapers on which the news was published showed differences, too. While
Posta and H¨urriyet generally used the third page, emphasizing the sensational and
criminal aspects of the events, Zaman and Cumhuriyet preferred to give the news on different pages. Posta’s and H¨urriyet’s juxtaposition of drowning-related news with the news about sexual harassment, prostitution, extortion, and burglary is another interesting finding we have reached.
Media has the power to affect ordinary people, politicians, and authorities. If a news item is covered in the media frequently and prominently, the audiences and the authorities regard the issue as more important than others. So people can be more
careful about the issue. Also with the agenda-setting power of media, newspapers can be more influential on politicians and authorities. Media could help promote better safety policies to prevent drowning and make public health authorities take some steps. Yet, media pays very little attention to drowning issues and reporting lacks in quality.
Major shortcomings of the newspapers scanned can be stated as the small num-ber of news articles, providing no background information, insufficient handling or indifference to the basic causes of the issue, and scarcity of expert views. By and large, all the newspapers evaluate drowning incidents mostly as dramatic and foren-sic events more than a serious matter of public health. Tragic, in fact sometimes tragicomic, and entertainment aspects of drowning cases seem to be forestalling the social and economic sides of the matter during the news-making and publishing processes of these papers.
Circulation rate and a desire to have the readers stay with the newspaper may be reasonable for the publication strategy of a newspaper to some extent. However, newspapers should not be commercial entities only, but also non-trading corpora-tions with the liability of public service and enlightenment. Therefore, we evaluate the news policies and applications such as the lack of expert views and putting the drama and magazine in front of the real event as serious flaws of these newspapers. We suggest that printed media should be more meticulous in selecting the language, presentation, and content of the news articles about drowning incidents, pushing themselves toward a more educational, informative, and comprehensive publishing strategy. Such an orientation will contribute a lot to bringing down the number of drowning incidents and their fatal results.
To sum up, in order to prevent drowning, news media should change its ap-proach to the issue. This study suggests that media should use its power to influence politicians, authorities, and ordinary people by publishing more news articles about drowning in order to have more rescue services, better access to rescue equipment, life-guards, and first aid training. Also, media has some social obligations such as in-creasing the awareness, warning, and educating its audiences against the threats like drowning. Instead of giving overrated dramatic and forensic (criminal) aspects of the drowning incidents, newspapers should focus more on background information and educate people against the dangers of drowning. Therefore, newspapers should give more space to drowning issues, especially in their health pages, and journalists should use more expert views in their news. Journalists should also question the public health authorities and politician more in order to see if they are developing any policy to prevent drowning. As it is more common among children and young males, authorities should focus more on young people, and also newspapers should publish their news as such that politicians and authorities cannot keep off the issue. Media can create an agenda for preventing drowning and influence the authori-ties so they can eliminate the physical hazards for swimming, determine the safe swimming areas, and support information about swimming conditions such as wa-ter temperature, discharge information, waves, and weather conditions. Media also should regularly inform parents that drowning is one of the major causes of death among children and young people and that they should not be left unsupervised in the swimming areas.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge Ozcan Bilgeturk and Emrah Ozdemir for their comments on a draft of this article. In addition, they are thankful to the Libraries of Istanbul University and Erzurum University for their support.
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