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New Politics of News Circulation and Reception in Turkey
Abstract
Considering news as a discursive construct that is produced and received by culturally, historically, and politically situated agents, in this paper I first discuss how news media in Turkey have become an increasingly significant subject of public debate and action. Several events in recent years have revealed the extent to which news acts as a genre of reality making designed to justify the grounds for dominant governmental politics. On December 28th 2011, for instance, Turkish army jets bombarded a convoy of Kurdish smugglers at the border of Iraq and Turkey, killing thirty-four people. The Turkish news media chose not to report on the massacre for several hours, until after officials made a public announcement stating that the convoy was bombed because it was using a PKK trail. The news silence was criticized massively on social media. Two years later, during the anti-government protests in the summer of 2013, several protestors were killed, injured, and illegitimately taken into custody by the police. After mainstream Turkish media deliberately ignored the news, thousands of white collar workers and business people gathered in front of NTV, a national news channel, to protest this and other examples of submission by popular TV channels to the micromanaging of news by key authority figures. After establishing this trend, I argue that news reception and circulation have turned into a political practice that individuals overtly acknowledge in a new way. People actively seek out media channels for news that is not filtered by authorities. They produce discourse about news as a political construct in their daily lives. They circulate news on social media as a political act. They identify with the news media they follow and condemn others through public actions on the streets or on social media. Based on an ongoing ethnographic study on news culture in Turkey, the paper uses data obtained through surveys, focus groups, and interviews with university students and white-collared workers to suggest that attitudes and behaviours towards news have changed in marked ways in Turkey as a direct response and counter-move to government-backed control measures.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Media