‘See no evil, read no evil’: the failing role of Turkish newspapers in coverage of Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt

ABSTRACT

On 15 July 2016, a group of soldiers tried to wrestle political control of Turkey from the elected government. The ‘coup attempt’ was declared over within approximately 10 h, but not before more than 300 civilians, police and soldiers had died. This paper examines how Turkish newspapers which are known to be ‘oppositional’ represented events of the night and the following few days before a state of emergency was declared which silenced almost all opposition. Through a close examination of images and written text, we reveal how newspapers fail to question government actions. Instead, an analysis of presuppositions and how social actors and their actions are recontextualised finds that newspapers represent events from the perspective of their political interests whilst not actually questioning the actions of the government. It is in this way that oppositional newspapers use the coup to further their interests at the expense of informing the public.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkish oppositional newspapers
• multimodal critical discourse studies
• Turkey
• failed coup attempt

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lyndon C.S. Way received his PhD in Journalism from Cardiff University and is a lecturer of media and communications at Liverpool Hope University. He is interested in critically examining the multimodal nature of popular culture, publishing in the areas of both popular music as discourse and news representations. He has recently co-edited a book on music as multimodal discourse and written a monograph on music and politics in Turkey.

Gökçen Karanfil is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Izmir University of Economics. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the Australian National University in 2007. His research interests are at the intersection of globalisation, transnationalism, and media sociology.

Aytunç Erçifci completed his BA in the field of Public Relations and Advertising. He is currently pursuing his MA degree at Izmir University of Economics in the field of media and communication studies. His research interests range across issues of nationalism, globalisation, journalism and media theory.

Notes

1 The Authors use the abreviation for Fethullah Gülen Movement.