What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists’ experience in Turkey’s mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid, the body emerges as a site on which precarity with multiple dimensions (economic anxiety, illness, and state violence) is inscribed. Under the conditions of what we deem political precarity, most journalists cannot speak truth to power as the pandemic is politically instrumentalized. This retheorizing of precarity dewesternizes the term by connecting it to state-induced forms of violence relying on relations of political recognition and value ascription. We urge journalism and media labor studies to refrain from Eurocentricism and technological determinism that center the standard employment model and the disruptive cultures of technology at the expense of body and politics.

The Production of Opinion on Turkish TV Channels: Discussion Programs and Technicians of Opinion This study aims to demonstrate how the opinion is produced and technicians of opinion are selected for debate programs in TV news channels in Turkey. For this purpose, discussion programs that were broadcast between November 24-2016 and October 4, 2016 on three main news channels; NTV, Cnn Türk and Habertürk were analysed. In addition to this, in depth interviews were conducted with the journalists working in these channels as well as the experts who appeared on these screens and with those who had been sidelined because of political reasons. The study demonstrates that technicians of opinion in these programs are selected through an effective filtering mechanism. Further, it is found that the social and political inequalities that already exist in the society are also manifested in different aspects of these programs which are instrumentalised for the reproduction of the official and hegemonic rhetoric.

The most common prime-time program format on mainstream TV news channels in Turkey is discussion programs that tend to last for several hours. This study, conducted in the aftermath of the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, when the country was in a state of emergency, examines the role of these programs in shaping public opinion by analyzing which agenda is being reproduced by media professionals and media experts. By adapting both qualitative and quantitative research tools, this study advances the following conclusions: 1) Journalists working in mainstream news channels and experts invited to programs on these channels are confined to an agenda set by government officials, and discuss issues within the framework set by those officials. 2) Despite the low ratings of such programs, the owners of these media outlets, with little or no bargaining power in the face of official authority following the state of emergency, are obliged to operate within the red lines drawn by government as the only option to securing the longer-term interests of their businesses in other sectors. 3) Under these constraints, some major topics that are in the public interest are either totally ignored or given little coverage.

Drones, with their ever-increasing use in recent warfare, are capable of transmitting high-quality images, which might then be exploited for propaganda purposes by the opposing forces in a war. In this article, the release of drone footages by the Ministry of Defence of Azerbaijan during the 44-day war in Karabakh against the Armenian forces in 2020 is analyzed, and the Turkish media’s approach to this matter is evaluated. It was observed that 45% of the videos uploaded to the Ministry’s Facebook and YouTube accounts were taken by drones. These videos frequently mentioned by the international media not only circulated on the internet but also were used by the Turkish media, often without being edited. The increasing use of such footages from battlefields also poses new questions in terms of peace journalism. This paper claims that drone footages that are promoted to provide visual journalistic evidence and unlimited access to battlefields have intrinsic war-oriented characteristics. When used as directly shared by the military, such raw footages serve an elite and propaganda-oriented attitude and shut the viewer into a closed space and time, dividing the world into “us” and “them” while contributing to the perception of “them” being the target.

Sağlıklı işleyen bir demokrasinin ön koşulu, toplumun her kesiminin sesinin duyulduğu çoğulcu bir medya sisteminin inşasıdır. Ancak medyada çoğulculuğun önünde çok sayıda hukuki, siyasal ve ekonomik engel ve sorun alanı bulunmaktadır. Bir ülkede medyada çoğulculuğun sağlanmasının önündeki bu engelleri aşmak için öncelikle sorunların izlenmesi ve tespit edilmesi gerekmektedir. Türkiye’de medya çoğulculuğunun izlendiği ve sorunların çok kapsamlı bir şekilde ele alındığı bu makalede, medyada çoğulculuk farklı yaklaşımlar üzerinden tanımlanmaktadır. Centre for Media Pluralism ve Media Freedom (CMPF) tarafından geliştirilmiş olan medyada çoğulculuğu izleme aygıtının kullanımı ile belirlenen göstergeler üzerinden medyada temel haklar, medya sektöründeki çoğulculuk, siyasal bağımsızlık ve toplumsal kapsayıcılık kategorilerinde 200 soruya verilen yanıtlar ile Türkiye’de medyada çoğulculuk izlenmekte, riskler belirlenerek sorunlar tespit edilmekte ve sorunların çözümüne yönelik önerilerde bulunulmaktadır. Bilgiye erişim hakkı, düzenleyici ve denetleyici kurumların tasarrufları, medya sahiplik yapısı, editoryal bağımsızlık, azınlık gruplarının medyaya erişimi gibi konuların değerlendirildiği kategorilerde Türkiye medyası tüm alanlarda yüksek risk grubunda bulunmaktadır.