One election, multiple stories: Polarized visual framing and media bias in the 2024 Turkish Mayoral elections

This study examines visual framing and media bias during Türkiye’s 2024 mayoral elections, a pivotal contest that marked the ruling AKP’s most significant electoral defeat in two decades. It investigates whether patterns of polarization identified in textual coverage extend to visual framing within a highly polarized media system operating under a competitive authoritarian regime. The analysis draws on a dataset of 6926 visuals published during the official campaign period on the websites of 11 legacy and alternative news outlets, covering six major mayoral candidates in İstanbul, Ankara, and İzmir. Using systematic content analysis, the study codes Grabe and Bucy’s visual character framing, and determines disparities in candidate portrayal and visibility across outlets with different political orientations. The findings reveal pronounced asymmetries between pro-government and pro-opposition media in both tone and volume of coverage. Pro-government outlets grant ruling-party candidates greater visibility and more favorable portrayals, while opposition candidates receive comparatively limited or strategically unfavorable framing. These results demonstrate that visual bias operates not only through framing choices but also through systematic exposure inequalities. The study argues that visual framing reinforces polarization and ruling-party advantage, contributing to the reproduction of uneven political competition in competitive authoritarian regimes.