The Fall of the Public and the Moral Contestation in the Journalistic Culture of Turkey

Media, Culture & Society

2018

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.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politics, power, and performativity in the newsroom: an ethnography of television journalism in Turkey

Media, Culture & Society

2018

“…Unlike ChannelPro, Channel Opposition has a strongly secular profile and strives to practice balanced journalism with a skeptical stance, remaining outside the pro-AKP media apparatus. The AKP’s authoritarian ruling practices (Aşık, 2017; Yeşil, 2018) threaten not only the channel’s entry into the professional field of journalism but also the social status of its news practitioners in wider society.…”

Section: Research Site and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

How does the political enter the newsroom? The representation of the Kurdish ‘Other’ in Turkish journalism

2021

Journalism

Self Cite

In this article, I examine how journalists working for the Turkish national mainstream televisual media represent Kurds – a significant national ‘Other’ of Turkish society – in the process of news production. My research is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2011 and 2014 in the newsrooms of two Turkish television channels with different political outlooks and experiences. The study reveals an unprecedented interest of mainstream television media in the inclusionary representation of Kurds during the research period due to a temporary change to the traditional Turkish state policy toward Kurds. In this new political context, I argue that the journalistic practice and discourse on Kurds is likely to be determined by political differences among Turkish journalists. The Turkish journalists working for these two different channels, for example, seek to justify and advance conflicting political agendas since they have contradicting political worldviews and political experiences. Based on these findings, this article demonstrates how the three factors of political worldview, political experience, and political context combine to shape journalistic values – the values which orient various stages of news production, at which journalists imagine, categorize, and articulate the Kurds and decide how to represent them in news outputs.

“…Hallin and Mancini (2004) offer the "polarized pluralist model" to define the media systems in European countries where political parties have powerful control over media practices, and journalists form alliances with competing party actors in a polarized political system. Despite the authoritarian strategies of the AKP, the polarized pluralist model might resonate well with the case of Turkish journalism, as the deepening social polarization in the country undermines any professional consensus on journalistic norms and values (Aşık 2017). This situation is likely to pave the way for the development of strong loyalties among Turkish journalists to various political ideologies and parties (Iseri et al 2019;Yıldırım et al 2020).…”

Section: Journalism and Ideologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideology, Polarization, and News Culture: The Secular-Islamist Tension in Turkish Journalism

The International Journal of Press/Politics

2022

Self Cite

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.