When Fake News and Personal Experience Contradict: Limits to Post-Truth in Turkey

ABSTRACT

While many studies examine Erdoğan’s growing control over the Turkish media sector, there are hardly any studies that look at how post-truth affects the low-income urban consumers of partisan media in Turkey, which this article aims to do. This focus group study reveals that the partisan media has a significant impact on the views and behaviour of the relatively less educated urban poor, but personal experiences prove a significant factor in the success of post-truth politics. If interviewees are locked into a relation of interest with Justice and Development Party organizations, particularly if they are recipients of social aid, their loyalty to Erdoğan and inclination to believe fake news from partisan media are stronger. However, when their personal experiences are diametrically different from the claims made in fake news, these individuals are harder to be persuaded by partisan media.

KEYWORDS:

• Ahaber
• clientelism
• Erdoğan
• populism
• post-truth
• social assistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Turkey hosts the world’s largest refugee population with more than 3,6 million Syrian refugees (since 2014) and more than 330,000 Afghan refugees and asylum seekers (since 2019) according to the official figures.

2. Some of them also watch other pro-government channels such as Habertürk, CNN Türk, or NTV.

3. This methodology is described e.g., in (Stewart and Shamdasani 2014, 123f).

4. ‘Do you think our government is fighting Covid-19 successfully? Has any of you had Covid? (If yes) have you or your relative received any government support in this period?’.

5. City hospitals in Turkey, unlike state-funded hospitals, are a particular type of clinic developed jointly by a private Turkish corporation and usually a foreign partner.

6. E-government is an online system for citizens to access various government services.

7. In Turkish media, the term page 3 refers to a collection of disaster news such as accidents, homicides, etc.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hüseyin Kalaycı

Hüseyin Kalaycı taught classes in departments of political science, international relations, and sociology at various private universities in Turkey before working as associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages as Yangtze Normal University. He published books, book chapters and articles on separatism, sub-national movements, sports and politics. Some of his articles published in Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Turkish Studies.