Abstract:

Every day, hundreds of newsworthy incidents occur all over the world. However; only limited number of such incidents is communicated to the society in the form of news. Qualitative or quantitative amplitude of the incident consequences is the most important factor increasing the chance of that incident in appearing in the news. In this sense, debates arise blaming the media with being “necrophilic”; none of the legal or moral sanctions are sufficient for changing such news making practices of the media. “Soma Disaster” recorded as a work and mining accident with the greatest death toll in our country`s history which occurred in Soma, Manisa on 13 May 2014 and resulted with the death of 301 mine workers received widespread media attention as „news‟ due to the scale of its qualitative and quantitative aspects and its horribleness. Objective of this study is to reveal the tendency of the media towards „negativity‟ and „negating‟ by Arş.Gör.Dr., Atatürk Üniversitesi İletişim Fakültesi, Radyo Televizyon ve Sinema Bölümü, [email protected] means of a content analysis conducted on the presentation of Soma Disaster on television news bulletins. For this purpose, main news bulletins of TRT 1, Channel D, STV and NTV has been selected as examples, 11-day period following the occurrence of the incident has been reviewed; and reflections of the incident in the news bulletins during this period have been studied based on various aspects of the news presentation such as duration, order, subject, content, approach, language, visual elements, repetition, exaggeration, categorization, exemplification, sound, actors, experts and subtitles.

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