Debates on media in Turkey overwhelmingly concentrate over the freedom of press, but there is an undiscussed crucial problem in Turkey’s media: increasing reliance over using conspiracy theories as “facts” in reporting and analysis. There are structural problems of media in Turkey, creating a journalism culture that magnifies polemical, subjective and heavily politicized tendencies. This article examines how conspiracy theories are used for “framing the truth” and presented as “analytical explanation” by Turkey’s various newspapers. Three critical junctures in Turkey’s contemporary politics and one international event were particularly viewed through the lens of conspiracy theories by the media in Turkey. These junctures are the Gezi Protests and corruption scandal concerning cabinet members erupting on 24 December 2013 and the 6-7 September 2014. Protests against siege of Kobâne by ISIS in various cities of Turkey, mostly dominated by the Kurds, and the Charlie Hebdo and subsequent Paris Attacks. Media reflections of all these events were dominated by conspiracy theories especially in pro-government newspapers, but also depending on the event, in almost all of the print and audio-visual media. While the three critical junctures listed above posed direct challenges against the ruling Justice and Development Party and specifically its leader President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and they were framed as a “coup attempts against the elected government”; Charlie Hebdo-Paris Attacks case has been portrayed as a “conspiracy against Islam” and even against Turkey itself by a sizeable group of leading politicians and by most circulated national newspapers alike. News reports and analysis through conspiracy theories lead the loss of “truth” and objectivity. This article examines the findings of content analysis conducted on six of national newspapers (two deemed as mainstream and four regarded as “pro-government”) for a time span of one month after each selected case event occurred. Content analysis is done by close reading of news reports and columns projecting conspiracies. The research assesses how the conspiracies are framed, what kind of conceptualizations and vocabulary were used to depict the “conspirators” and who were they, and how the politicians’ narrative was mirrored/interpreted by the reporters and columnists. The article also aims to question why conspiracy theories are disseminated by the media without scrutiny and with enthusiasm, and what purpose do these theories serve. Overall, the article analyzes the dynamics of the media culture of Turkey with regards to its attraction to circulate conspiracy theories.

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.

The immensely popular and controversial Turkish franchise Valley of the Wolves has run for 12 years, encompassing 3 TV series and 4 feature films thus far, and making its way to much of the Arab world, the Balkans, the Turkic republics, and parts of Europe. Valley has been lauded by some for its exposure of hidden political truths while being panned by others for spreading disinformation and contributing to ethnic and political strife at domestic and international levels. Both sides of this argument tend to focus on two trends: Valley’s blending of fact and fiction and its engagement with conspiracy theory. An examination of the Valley text and the discourses surrounding it reveals abundant anecdotal evidence attesting to the naiveté of Turkish viewers and the speciousness of conspiracy theories that circulate among them. The current season, for example, expounds a story that puts the British dynasty at the heart of a global conspiracy linking the Ebola outbreak in Africa and the rise of the Islamic State to the Turkish domestic agenda. Critiques of the show and its viewers, however, must be placed in the context of a long and invested tradition of portraying portions of the Turkish public as ignorant. Furthermore, In a country marked by a past and present in which collusions between the state, media, big business, and organized crime are widely acknowledged, conspiracy thinking may be an important means for framing everyday life. In this paper I focus on the role of conspiracy in the Valley text and among its publics. Drawing on Valley, its media footprint, and interviews with members of its public, I engage the debate between more alarmist understandings of conspiracy theory (e.g. Hofstadter 1952; Pipes 1996; Byford 2011), which focus on its danger; interpretive approaches, which view it as a strategy for coping in a world where master narratives are increasingly scarce (e.g. Comaroff & Comaroff 2003; Fenster 1999; West & Sanders 2003); and those approaches that examine real conspiracies that have come to light and the social significance of transparency (e.g. Marcus 1999; Fortun & Fortun 1999; Aureli 1999). While all three approaches have their merits and shortcomings in explaining the Valley phenomenon, ultimately, I suggest that the circulation of conspiracy through Valley should be viewed as a genre-based phenomenon that entails a cynical response to Turkish socio-political life.

As the universalist/right-based social protection has weakened due to global neoliberalism, debates about the role of Islamic provision of social welfare have increased in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This study focuses on Turkey as a case study to evaluate the effectiveness of the provision of the faith-based social protection practices. It has two objectives. First, it briefly examines the historical transformation of social policy in Turkey under the rule of the AKP (the Justice and Development Party), 2002-present. Second, it evaluates the outcome of this transformation and its potential implications for both social protection and politics. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative data collected during the fieldwork in Turkey in the summer of 2013 and 2014. The preliminary results suggest that the provision of faith-based social welfare is far from being need-based; rather, it becomes a highly selective almsgiving as it is inclusive for only those who are poor and willing to give political support to the government in return.

For much of the 2000s, Turkey underwent a process of social, political, and economic transformation toward what beneficiaries of these changes termed, "conservative democracy." During this period, Turkey's media landscape was transformed to cater to the interests of a new "conservative democratic" elite that redefined state-media relations to perpetuate the interests of its clients and patrons. The impact of these transformations reached a tipping point in the summer of 2013 when during the early days of the Gezi Park protests, Turkey's primary producers of mainstream news either under covered the events at Gezi Park, or remained silent altogether. Indeed, despite widespread international coverage, breaking news from Turkish sources in the first week of the uprising was both sparse and monolithic; and this was as true for government-sympathetic media as it was for so-called mainstream and mass opposition media. Did the forces of conservative democracy crush Turkey’s Fourth Estate? This paper draws on research conducted among mainstream journalists in Turkey to suggest that although the Turkish free press has long had problems with a managerial state apparatus, recent efforts to control media coverage reflect a new era of social control and social critique. Authoritarian dictates from above, although still present, have given way to patterns of self-censorship brought on by corporate media consolidation and fears of economic (i.e., civil) retribution. Exemplified by the emergence of a new "activist media," however, the findings of this research suggest that rather than crushing free speech all together, the collapse of the mainstream has created new opportunities for critique. Drawing from qualitative data collected among a diverse sample of media professionals, this paper concludes that although successful in stymieing dissent in the short term, increasing control of public discourse in Turkey is creating a space for durable social critique in a more diverse public sphere.

Challenges of achieving peace are as old as thoughts about it. Departing from a social movements perspective, my paper addresses the issue of mobilization around peace in militaristic societies, Israel and Turkey in comparison. By giving special attention to political opportunities, mobilizing structures and framing, this paper examines how peace movements persist in Israel and Turkey. My main question is: how can we explain the way activists shape their frames and alignments in relation to their different contexts? My argument is based on fieldwork done from Summer 2012 until Summer 2014 through different times in Istanbul, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I look at interviews I conducted with activists from different groups like anarchists, feminists, and religious people. In order to show the difference in peace movements’ evolvement in two countries, I look at how activists adapt their framing and build alignments with other groups within the different political opportunities in Israel and Turkey. I discuss the different political environments in both countries, and ask how activists define the problem and their position and to what extent they build alliances with other groups. Moreover, by using different time frames, my aim is to demonstrate whether there have been any changes in their mobilization, and if yes in what way. Throughout the paper, I resort to the conceptual repertoire of evolution of peace activism and contextualize it in relation to the field of social movements. Through my interviews, I discovered that in contrast to Israel, in Turkey the development of mobilizing structures and framing are limited. In this respect, I make two main propositions: first, the difference can be observed in the messages activists want to communicate with general public. Second, the degree of building alliances is a reflection of the ideological criteria for cooperation with other groups. In conclusion, this paper sheds new light on the neglected issue of evolvement of peace movements. What I show is the role (un)favorable political opportunity structures play in the way frames and mobilizing structures are shaped by activists.