How do political divisions within the newsroom shape negotiations around news production? This article addresses this question by examining how Turkish journalists, in their discourse and practices, represent Kurds and Arabs when interpreting and discussing current events related to the Kurdish question and the Arab Spring. The study draws upon a year of ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012, in the newsrooms of two mainstream national television channels in Turkey. It reveals how journalists with opposing political beliefs perform their representational practices by continuously modifying them according to the opinions of managerial boards. In negotiations on the portrayal of Kurds and Arabs in news reports, journalists mask or modify ‘undesired’ aspects of their individual interpretations to fit them into a dominant news frame. However, they can also challenge that frame. Based upon the observation of such negotiations, this article advances a novel definition of journalistic performance as a purposeful, strategic, and staged form of symbolic communication: an essential tool for navigating ideological conflicts in the power structure of the newsroom.

The deepening social polarization and increasing state pressure in Turkey undermines the participation of journalists as the custodians of public interest in the public sphere based on the principle of common good. Using the data of my ethnographic fieldwork in newsrooms, I explore the features of legitimate journalistic activity without normative connection to the public. The Islamic-based ruling party (AKP) attempts to transform the public into its own intimate, family-like sphere. Journalists are compelled to either totally merge with the AKP-friendly family that dominates the public, or retreat to the privacy of the newsroom as an act of resistance and withdraw from contact with the ‘other’ journalistic community. Examining this “otherization” and isolation is crucial to understanding the ways in which the pursuit of professional ethics is replaced by self-centered norm-defining practices articulated in the rhetoric of intimacy rather than of the debate-oriented public sphere of journalists.

imajında milliyetçilik ile toplumsal cinsiyetin birbirini kuran bir ilişkiye sahip olduğu ve bu ilişkinin dindar muhafazakar ya da seküler olsun katılımcıların birçoğu için günümüz Türk kadınını tanımlamada bir referans noktası oluşturduğu görülmüştür. Çalışmamızın önemli bir diğer sonucu ise kadın katılımcılarda fark ettiğimiz güç istencidir. Dizide kadın karakterlerin eril güce, beğenilen güçlü erkek karakterlerin eşi ya da annesi olarak ulaşabildiklerini düşünen kadın katılımcılar, gerçek hayatlarında böyle bir gücü erkeklerden devşirme arzusunda olsalar da, ataerkil değerlerin sarsılmasıyla arzu ettikleri güçten uzaklaştıklarını düşünmektedirler.

What role does political ideology play in the production of news in a contentious cultural context? To address this question, this article investigates how Turkish Islamic conservative journalists produced and circulated representations of two dramatic uprisings in 2013: the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and the military coup in Egypt. I chose these two cases because the Islamic political bias and activism that shaped the production of news about these two events are symptomatic of the way in which Islamism as a political ideology instrumentalizes news making. Based on newsroom ethnography conducted at an Islamic national mainstream television channel in Turkey between 2011 and 2014, the article demonstrates how Islamism shapes the ways in which Islamic conservative journalists interpreted and articulated the two events in the newsroom, and represented them in news coverage. In this context, journalistic practice gains an ideological character when the journalists utilize journalistic representations as strategic instruments to advance the political agenda of Islamic conservatives against secular forces in Turkey. As the polarization between Islamic and secular groups is based on cultural distinctions, I argue that the political ideology determining journalistic practices is defined not only by party affiliations or socioeconomic class positions but also by the common cultural ways of living and thinking of journalists who work and live as members of a sociocultural group. Islamic ideology serves as a social cement that creates bonds among the IslamicTV journalists as a sociocultural group, and a degree of unity and common purpose in their professional practices.

This article explores the Urabi Revolt (1879-1882) in Egypt as a unique historical event from Philip Abrams' theoretical perspective. Abrams argues that the extent of the complexity and uniqueness of a historical event can be assessed based on the conjunction of various elements and aspects the event embodies. The Urabi movement represents a "puzzle of the complex factors", to use Abrams' terminology, which impacts a large-scale social transformationthe transition of Egypt from a Middle Eastern monarchy to a modern nation-state. Departing from this point of view, in the article, I argue that the Urabi movement was a convergence of a range of loosely related developments over the course of a historical event. Hence the question here is not about choosing a single development among a variety of them and focusing on it to explain the whole process, but about capturing how each development shaped the course and character of the event and to what degree.