Conditions of sense making and news making in Turkey after the failed coup attempt: Sisyphus labor on two fronts

Abstract

Turkey has been experiencing events with major impacts on almost all areas of life, including journalism, since the failed coup attempt of 15 July. Since then, the public’s access to healthy news by the public and news making by journalists/news organizations have become increasingly crucial, yet complex operations. This article focuses on the 2 months after failed coup attempt, from the events that took place in the very first hours of the coup attempt, which are presented and discussed from media and communication perspective. This is followed by a detailed critical examination of consequently declared state of emergency in relation to news and news organizations. Then, post-coup attempt situation in Turkey is contextualized in a global tendency, namely, increasing complexity in sense making as journalistic institutions’ public service roles deteriorate.

Turkey’s news media landscape in Twitter: Mapping interconnections among diversity

“…Only until the last half-decade, Turkey had a vibrant media industry with hundreds of television channels, thousands of local and national radio stations, several dozen newspapers, and a rapidly growing infrastructure for broadband Internet (Tuncel, 2011). However, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) fashioned a news environment by creating its own pro-AKP outlets and closed >100 media organizations (3 news agencies, 16 television stations, 23 radio stations, 45 newspapers, 15 magazines, and 29 publishing houses and distribution companies) following the failed coup attempt in July 2016 (Akin, 2016). Twitter is an aspect of this environment, where leading stakeholders of the media industry in Turkey come to claim their domain, while media organizations that are smaller in scale sustain their operations.…”

Hashtag publics, networked framing and the July 2016 'coup' in Turkey

“…A total of 277,964 #darbeyehayir tweets, posted between 15 and 19 July 2016 were collected for this study. These data were transferred into text-mining software DiscoverText which is an application that allows users to code and mine social media content (Shulman, 2011) [6]. The process of data cleansing was implemented to improve data quality.…”

“…During this period, online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter played an important role in coordinating and publicising street protests (Karagöz and Kandemır, 2016). Both pro and antigovernment TV news networks disseminated information about anti-'coup' demonstrations, providing a platform for politicians from both AK and the other parties to articulate their opposition to these events (Akin, 2017). Supporters of President Erdoğan played a key role in the street protests, preventing the 'coup' organisers from gaining access to areas of strategic importance such as the Parliament building and the National Intelligence Agency (Esen and Gumuscu, 2017).…”

Screening for Erdoğanism: Television, post-truth and political fear

“…In this new economy, state resources and rents are distributed among the politically loyal working and middle classes, and the Islamist business elite. Erdoğanism articulates its own truth regime, by systematically altering facts and providing a grotesque interpretation of reality to spread fear, mistrust and hatred towards any conflicting truth claims (see Akın, 2016).…”