Guest Editor’s Introduction

The idea for this study, part of a three-tranche research program conducted by the University of Cambridge-Al Jazeera Media Project, started with the upheavals of 2011. Across the Arab world, protestors expressed the desire for a new political culture and social freedoms, using media in innovative ways to share and project their messages. Turkey, although not directly affected by the 2011 uprisings, nonetheless experienced severe repercussions from that period in the form of widespread protests over Gezi Park in 2013, leading in time to the significant tussle for power between its two powerful Islamic factions—the ruling AKP and the Gülen Movement—that culminated in the attempted coup of 2016. As with the other two states in this research project, Morocco and Tunisia, the underlying changes informing Turkish society included heightened awareness of civic power and a recalibration of citizens and central authority interactions through the use of social and conventional media as forms of expression and exchange. The questions therefore arose: What impact is political transition having on the media in Turkey, and how is it a reflexive process? This forced us to revisit a critical term of enquiry used for this study, namely the concept of political transition, which, since 2011, has shown itself to be a shaky, even misleading concept, and one that has encompassed unpredictable political and directional shifts on the ground that, as our research has shown, tilts easily (if not more easily) from liberal to authoritarian paradigms than the other way around.

The plan for the three-state study began in Tunisia, the first location of in-depth field research as the country underwent major political change with the ousting of a heavy-handed dictator and his regime’s (and family’s) replacement by a constitutionally elected government. The articles developed through that study addressed: (1) the legal and regulatory structure defining the media sphere; (2) the functioning of the sector itself in terms of market presence, journalism practices and professional associations; and (3) the agency it exercised vis-à-vis the audience, including social media and internet activity. These three categories—structure, function and agency—then went on to organize the subsequent research carried out in Morocco and Turkey, as did the general subjects we covered in the Tunisia tranche, including radio and citizen journalism, online surveillance, and women in television talk shows, subjects covered in the articles included in this special issue on Turkey. The rationale for the research design was to enable, for the first time, cross-border comparisons based on common subjects and themes, in order to unpack similarities and differences within the regional instrumentalization and governance of media, and media’s cultural and symbolic role in political and social processes. As Stefano Allievi notes, ‘The idea of “crossing borders” … is not often used in this field.’ Although he refers primarily to Muslim communities in Europe, his further observation concerning the study of media in the southern Mediterranean is apt: ‘most research … has studied the Muslim populations/groups/communities … in themselves,’ focusing on a particular country, or drawing together single studies of different countries organized by a common theme, often the process of a conference or workshop.¹

This special issue, therefore, constitutes a unique departure, in that the articles were developed according to a rigorous set of research imperatives devised prior to the conduct of field research, and which then were designed to highlight processes and practices (such as regulatory practices, the setting of red lines, the role of gender, and the cultural values codified in media law) that constituted a like-for-like data-set that thereby could be compared across the region. Its approach, therefore, is along the lines of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘materialist’ struggle against ‘separating ideas, norms and values from their embedded practices,’ and instead, to analyze ‘the power struggles, strategies of distinction, symbolic violence of “consensus,” and multiple tactics of agents through a detailed empirical analysis of a specific social universe.’²

This special issue brings together seven articles produced by media scholars located in Turkey, who (with the exception of the project’s post-doctoral Fellow, Ali Sonay, himself partially Turkish) not only have studied the field for many years, but personally experienced the upheavals in the country during the period covered here, both as researchers and as members of the academic community, which itself was at times the subject of political scrutiny. This collection, composed during these convulsive times, therefore constitutes not only a unique analysis of Turkey’s media field in transition, but a chronicle offering an in-depth view at a particular and critical moment in Turkey’s modern history.

Change in Historical Context

Turkey’s media, as with media throughout the region, has undergone major transformations over the past three decades. Four significant shifts stand out: technological change, globalization, liberalization, and ideological evolution. The high-tech transition into digital fundamentally has altered the capacity and the diversity of the media as it has everywhere, shifting it in Turkey from a centralized, government-controlled instrument of information dissemination, to a diversified, multi-platform, multi-sourced, networked mechanism that both institutionally and individually is produced and consumed. The technological shifts alone required new structural frameworks in law and through regulatory bodies to organize and monitor media as both a public and private good—a process that began formally in Turkey only at the beginning of the 1990s.

The technical challenges have been joined by ideological shifts in Turkey over the same two decades. Moving from Ataturk’s nationalist laic system to an Islamic conservative one has been contested, as cycles of centralization and politicization have overlaid cycles of decentralization and democratization, with the media playing a key role throughout. The contribution by Farmanfarmaian, Sonay and Akser in this issue outlines the media’s structural trajectory from 1980, as the military’s control shifted, and Islamic governments gradually gained prominence. Speaking of the period when relations with the army were vital for the media, particularly as its role was to convey the Republic’s official ideology, Etyen Mahçupyan, director of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation’s Democratization program, noted: ‘[A]s the voice of the “center” defined by the state, the media also represented the identity-related aspect of this center. Hence, there was born a media world that Otherized those who were outside the center, and that gained privileges and concessions by advocating laicism and the Turkish ethnic identity.’³ Hence, the media was not just mirror and messenger, but by its very character and values, the message itself, as McLuhan presciently observed in the 1960s.⁴ Yet, Turkish media’s values were linked directly to the status it could command, which represented a constant gamble over social positioning. ‘Hence, media organs started to see themselves as political actors that could bargain with the government,’ Mahçupyan observes, ‘an approach that rapidly corrupted the sector.’ Indeed, on the one hand, it imbued the media with a sense of its own capacity as a political protagonist, while on the other hand, impoverishing it in the eyes of the public as a medium lacking neutrality.

The push-pull in Turkey’s ideological sphere as Islamist party agendas gradually gained legitimacy and then ascendency over secular ones led to two significant rifts shaking the country from the top down, embroiling the media in the process. The first constituted the rift beginning with the 2008 Ergenekon trials, between the laic/nationalist/military and the Islamic power centers; the second constituted the possibly even more significant rupture within the Islamic domain, between the Gülen movement and the AKP. Adding to these two seismic shifts, significant economic restructuring, representing global trends, has led to a three-decades-long liberalization process, impacting the media’s market as well as the regulations, laws and practices determining the media’s role in society and politics.

Turkey’s media environment is vast, with thousands of newspapers and radio stations—and Turkey ranks among the top 15 countries in number of Facebook users, with half of its 77 million people accessing it monthly.⁵ Yet media is currently the source of much public-government tension. Erdoğan, who for years as both Prime Minister and subsequently President has been able to muster rallies conservatively estimated in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), is deeply suspicious of the media’s power and unfazed by international opprobrium at the rising numbers of jailed and silenced journalists under his watch. In April 2014, for instance, Freedom House lowered Turkey’s media rating from ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’,⁶ causing an outburst from Erdoğan’s AKP, which recently had shut down Twitter, and reduced access to YouTube and Vimeo.⁷ Additionally, as detailed by Seda Yuksel in this issue, as Turkey found itself in the cross-hairs of violence associated with Syria’s war, trans-border migration pressures, and internal divisions within the Islamist camp, the government tightened controls over both internet and conventional media on the grounds that it must protect national security and individual privacy—key values within the Turkish cultural lexicon of identity and community.

For journalists, writing about the military, the government, the Kurds, political Islam, or national security—all issues in which the values of the Turkish state, and media’s role in producing an environment of cultural belonging and political credibility make them highly political—a misapprehension around the leverage of language or opinion can lead to arrest and criminal prosecution. Indeed, journalists writing or broadcasting on such subjects—particularly the Kurds, or recently the Gülen movement—face the risk of having their reporting confused as the equivalent of support. This idea is pursued in Farmanfarmaian, Sonay and Akser’s analysis of the role of national security as a value protecting government actions and credibility in laws that have their roots in the Kemalist period and which constitute a value structure in Turkey that defines the border between free expression and media over-reach. Milieus in which values and status are being negotiated because the field is defined by unsettled red lines established by confessional practices, paternalistic hubris and/or authoritarian power, position the media as perpetually unstable, and although there will be some who will view the environment as free, indeed liberated by the choice to emphasize religious and conservative issues, there are others who find it constraining, and professional survival possible only through self-censorship. Scholars in Turkey, though not immune to political persecution or pressure—as many discovered when they signed a petition for peace relating to the Kurdish issue and found the red lines surrounding that act had thickened to their detriment,⁸ nonetheless, with less risk, can research and write on issues such as the Kurdish peace process and investigate critical questions such as internet freedom.

Focusing on the media in Turkey has offered an opportunity to look deeply into a society in significant turmoil and to read between the lines of what media is—and is not—printing (but nonetheless, conveying). It has enabled assessment of the changes in value signification, media’s status positioning, language use, political tenor, Islamist discourse, and social media surveillance as Turkey has experienced changes in how religion has affected its politics, how war in Syria has affected its alliances, and how expanding high-tech communication capacities have rejigged its economic and religious networks. As corruption and insecurity have risen, media has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of political and financial elites, as discussed in Aslı Tunç’s analysis of the functioning of the media sector in a hybrid political and technological setting. Underlying this trend has been the AKP’s drive to develop a collective identity of modern Turkishness that not only provides active support for the government but also engages the ideological and market resources of religious and economic networks that link the provinces to the center. Ali Sonay in his fine-grained look at ‘Local Media in Turkey: The Growth of Islamic Networks in Konya’s Radio Landscape’ unpacks this process based on interviews he conducted throughout the Anatolian heartland, but particularly in Konya, where radio outlet ownership and communication linkages were revealed to constitute a thick net of reflexive relations in which social, political and economic capital merged and multiplied, strengthening the bonds between shared values and status and thereby, access to resources.

Another key plank of this project has been the modernization of a political discourse of Islamo-Ottomanism. Burul and Eslen-Ziya elucidate the effect of this process in ‘Understanding “The New Turkey” through the Eyes of Women: Gender Politics in Turkish Talk-Shows,’ in which they discuss the mediation of discursive governance to promote broad-based acceptance of conservative values within the framework of liberal economic practices. Those who do not accept Erdoğan’s New Turkey values, such as members of the Gülen movement, the Kurds, or mainstream publishers such as the Doğan group, have seen their media muzzled and their social status plummet through a reanimation of the ‘Other.’ In the process, they have become a threat to the state, as illustrated by Seda Yuksel in ‘Representation of Terror and Ethnic Conflict in the Turkish Press: an Analysis of the Peace Process,’ and in Michelangelo Guida’s ‘Negotiating Values in the Islamist Press after 2013.’ What Guida also illustrates, however, is the complexity in the process of Othering, unpacking the gradual build-up of diverging discourses between the AKP and the Gülen movement, and capturing the building animosity as his narrative leads ominously to the attempted coup and the total breakdown between the two. Witnessing in retrospect the language, suspicions and accusations that rolled off the presses prior to the event makes for fascinating reading and offers a unique vision of how and why both the AKP and Gülen were products of the political situation that followed.

Empirical Research in Search of a new Theory

As investigation proceeded through the tumultuous years of 2014 to 2017 in Turkey, a broader question arose that has been addressed throughout the articles in this issue: Is it useful to see the southern ‘Mediterranean’ culture as characterized by a ‘high degree of proximity between the media field and the political field, [with] a relative domination of the former by the latter’ as argued by Hallin and Mancini?⁹ Were such relations observable and did they in fact provide a valid mechanism by which to understand social structures and the media’s power in the states and region under investigation? For the collection in this special issue in particular, does Turkey, variously viewed as a hybrid democracy and liberal autocracy, conform to this model? By looking at how Turkey constructs and understands its public sphere, the resources it represents, and the expansion of alternative media output through technological capacity and political openings toward Islamist publishing, we have broken down that sphere into several component parts—the commercial market, the regulatory landscape, Islamist discourse, surveillance, gender, social media—in order to unpack the utilization of media as both political and public instrument, so as to understand better the media as a part of governance as well as a reflection of power in the Middle East.

In Hallin and Mancini’s categorization, the Turkish system would be labeled Polarized Pluralist, defined generally as ‘integration of the media into party politics, weaker historical development of commercial media, and a strong role of the state,’ a model they see as common in the Mediterranean region, but which to their credit, they state at the outset, is an ideal type that must immediately engage with qualifications to reflect more accurately the media system of any given nation.¹⁰ What the model does not do is provide the means to understand how the public defines the role of media, how layers of alternative media outputs impact the public sphere, and how media in societies organized around norms evolved from foundations that differ from the Anglo-American experience develop professional ethics of journalism and social purpose. Therefore, we think that Hallin and Mancini’s Comparing Media Systems, to paraphrase their own critique of Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm’s Four Theories of the Press, which preceded theirs and exercised the greatest influence on media studies until their own schema came to dominate the field, has ‘stalked the landscape’ of scholarship on Middle East media ‘beyond its natural lifetime.’ A theory addressing the particularities of the societies in the Middle East and North Africa needs to be considered.¹¹

Thus, we have begun to build a new framework, which we call Values and Status Negotiation Theory (VSN). This is not to dismiss Hallin and Mancini’s important work, which effectively analyzes mass media systems as systems, nor indeed, the work of Blumler, Katz and Gurevitch, who proposed a functionalist approach to analyze the role of needs and gratification in the way people use media in order to understand media behavior.¹² Our work, building on those and others, looks less at categorizing media as a system, or the gratifications and needs media fills and more at how and why it is entangled in the societies that produce it; the resources and power the media commands within a given society; the role of piety and confessional norms on journalism as a professional practice; the character, credibility and modus agenti of media in paternalistic/autocratic regimes; and the impact of media that is not part of the ‘mass’ but can be understood as powerful. VSN, we admit, is still exploratory; it draws on concepts of normative agency¹³ and resilient centralized power located in societies characterized by networks of interlaced resource systems, which include elite linkages, whether religious, commercial, political, ethnic, and/or provincial.

Based on empirical research gathered in three southern Mediterranean states—Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey—and then compared using like-for-like evidence, scholars within the project, identified common and divergent attributes. The patterns that emerged over time coalesced into a conceptual framework in which values and status encompassed the tensions and drivers of media-society relations, a relationship constantly in flux as the two aspects—symbolic power (values) and politico-economic power (status) were negotiated, sometimes to good effect, other times disastrously, bringing down media of all stripes as centrally managed value sets resignified the nature of status. Although three cases offer only a beginning, they provide the empirical basis to develop a new approach to understanding media as an entity within the sociocultural fabric and to understand its nature as a political resource that shares attributes, including power, with others in these social systems.

Value and Status Negotiation (VSN): A New Theoretical Approach

Media, in positioning itself through the configuration of shifting values and interests as projected by competing social groups, is enmeshed in systems of contextual opposition. This becomes particularly the case if scaled to include political leadership and modes of authority that employ norms as social capital for ideological purposes. It is also the case where economic patronage and ownership are determining factors in private sector negotiation for margins of autonomy.¹⁴ In such a milieu, the media continuously must recalibrate the values it projects to protect its legitimacy, and hence its status (at times, forcing it to fight even for its survival). It is this process that has been under-studied in media theory and which is addressed in VSN.

Values within the framework of VSN are defined as politicized norms that exist in unstable configurations. As Tugba Basaran and Christian Olsson observed in their analysis of the values they describe as ‘the international,’ values can be ‘vested in people and things’, becoming a way ‘to describe their attributes and properties’ and in so doing, can reorder (or accompany the reordering) of the power relations between them.’¹⁵ Values thus represent symbolic capital, and can be converted into other forms of capital (economic, political, social, cultural). If the instrumentalization of those values is concentrated in the hands of political leaders, this leads to Carl Schmitt’s ‘decisionism,’ rendering ‘absolute the will of the leader, and through it, political norms, to the disadvantage of juridical and moral ones.’¹⁶

The most valuable resource linked to the symbolic power of values is status. It is the mark of strategically exercised social capital, and it confers to the media that produce it effectively, social power, access to other forms of capital and impact on the networks of influence that construct society. The relationship between values and status continuously is being negotiated as a process of social positioning within political context, particularly in states where centralized leadership can determine, or at least significantly influence, the values being projected, and the media instrumentalized for the purpose. Media is thus a ‘meaning manager,’ an agent projecting the import of information as much as actual facts, and dependent on those in power to adjudge its status as it positions itself in a hierarchy of domination.¹⁷ At the same time, those in authority rely on the media to produce a symbolic economy that legitimates the values the state and its networks are at any given moment utilizing as resources of identity.

This is not to say that objective, professionally trained journalists (in the Western tradition) are not part of the system, nor that opposition media (particularly with the new capacity offered by Twitter, YouTube and Facebook) do not act as government watchdogs. Both, however, tend to operate outside the networks of elite, religious or commercial power; the importance of status is less critical to this group than the idealism and value legitimacy they espouse, rendering negotiation for them, even for survivability, comparatively of less relevance.

For the majority, for whom status is important in that it is closely tied to social inclusion, access to resources, stability, reputation, prosperity, security, credibility or survivability, values are by necessity more fluid, able to be adjusted, traded, contested, reframed, redefined and rationalized in accordance with new understandings of interests and risks. The process of negotiating values and status is by definition political and relational. If values previously associated with symbolic power lose their material utility due to strategic shifts in political emphasis by the leadership, for example, the process of negotiation involves re-signifying the meanings associated with those values into new frames better suited to the social context. Media that effectively negotiate the re-contextualized values into symbolic capital are then recognized as legitimate social agents, which assures for the moment, their status. For any given media at any given time, this may (or may not) encompass freedom to express what it considers sayable and/or printable. On the other hand, the process of negotiation is not immune from manipulation, and may equally evolve from and contribute to clientelism and corruption both morally and politically.

It would be a mistake, however, to see this process as only representing social relations in coercive political environments. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink note such negotiation goes on regularly in the international sphere, when NGOs engage in norm entrepreneurship.¹⁸ Media as theorized in VSN, therefore can be understood to act in ways similar to norm entrepreneurs, using symbolic capital in the field of social relations to ensure status, and as such, can be analyzed as significant actors in the socialization process of inducing value adaptation in their capacity to target actors and audiences publicly for behaviors consonant with, or violating, shifting value regimes. Erkan Saka’s article in this issue, ‘AKP Trolling: Social Media in Turkey as a Space for Political Battles’ is of particular relevance in this context, for it looks at the legal and political practice of online surveillance and obstruction, as well as the assumptions surrounding who is complicit in conducting trolling, phishing, and other digital activist disruption as resources for value targeting and reform. His unexpected conclusions are drawn from interviews that are at times painfully revealing of the turmoil and confused sense of responsibility (surely confined not just to Turkey) in the hybrid digital environment of values and status negotiation.

The issue of ethics—whether in terms of journalistic professionalism, or moral positioning in social relations—is at the crux of the question that addresses the balancing of practice, culture and politics, as ethics are rarely seen as negotiable. Our contention is that identity plays an important role in how ethics are defined and acted upon and thus, legitimated. To quote Margaret Urban Walker, we understand ethics as an understanding of morality which provides understanding of ourselves as bearers of responsibilities in the service of values.’¹⁹ In this regard, Mohammed-Ali Abunajela and Noha Mellor maintain that Anglo-American values, which have strongly influenced both professional codes of journalism and a critique of moral responsibilities within a universalist discourse, increasingly are being perceived in the Islamic world, for example, as discordant with lived culture and practice, and that the media, ‘as an important social agent with the potential to influence community perceptions,’ is ‘asserting new professional identit[ies], balancing journalistic codes with Islamic duties.’²⁰

The media in Turkey, and elsewhere in the southern Mediterranean, can be understood, according to this approach, as having developed within a structure that looks less at what ideal (by Western standards) journalism should be, or indeed, how to conceptualize what best practices and good media are, but rather at how media best can serve the state and community, and those who exercise its symbolic power to discipline and promote shared national imaginaries, social cohesion, national identity and elite (including corporate) networks of influence. Pointing to its bi-axial capability, which is both its power, but for politicians, also often its threat, Mellor observes, ‘The media can be seen as a set of intersected resources, enabling and constraining at the same time: they connect people to accentuate their belonging to one unified, imagined community, while enabling their movement across diverse and unrelated fields, which threatens the foundations of this community.’²¹

For this reason, media in party politics were found, in contrast to Hallin and Mancini’s Polarized Pluralist model, to have tenuous links.²² Party politics were weak in the networked societies we analyzed, mirroring community politics more generally, and offering, like media, a resource that was instrumentalized through processes of values and status negotiation, thus waning and waxing in influence within the public square at different political junctures, and critically, showing little consistency in integrating with the media.²³ Indeed, Islamic media, particularly in Turkey, which has blossomed as a sector presence since Hallin and Mancini’s model was developed, reflects a complexity of network negotiation through politics and faith that confirms our claim that as media ‘takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures in which it operates,’ that is, reproduces the society that produces it, and if that society is quite differently organized than those which spawned other theories, then a new theory particular to this kind of social system is required. VSN, as a theoretical framework is more fully utilized in the issue’s first article, ‘The Structure of Turkish Media,’ to illustrate the application of the model; importantly, Farmanfarmaian, Sonay and Akser show how values have been incorporated directly into the laws and regulations governing the media in Turkey in ways that reflect a specific Turkishness in terms of national values and their reflection in community organization and Islamic identity.

In sum, to understand not just how media functions in societies that differ in organization and value focus from those in the West, from where the most influential systems theories of media until now have emanated, but also why the media function as they do, we have drawn on empirical research conducted in the field between 2014 and 2017 across Turkey, as well as Morocco and Tunisia, to develop a new theoretical paradigm. The data has indicated that in the strongly confessional and socially networked states of the southern Mediterranean, where political organization is elaborated at some level through centralized hybrid forms of authoritarianism, which inevitably has affected how media has professionalized, values and status negotiation (VSN) offers a way forward, one we consider may be generalizable across the Middle East. As with Hallin and Mancini, the theory we contend, comes alive only with the many variables that characterize and differentiate each state. At the same time, we propose that this model serves conceptually to organize and clarify the richness of the data into a media frame that is both theoretically consistent and parsimonious.

This theory could not have taken shape without the vision of Driss Ksikes, who developed the original concept. His input as the theory’s contours have developed and broadened has been invaluable, and sincerest thanks go to him as the originator of the phrase, Values and Status Negotiation. Deepest thanks also go to Ali Sonay, the Al Jazeera Post-Doctoral Fellow on the project, who has been integral to every aspect of the project’s success, and in particular, to the quality and production of this special issue. And genuine gratitude goes to the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), where, as a Resident Fellow, I had the precious time to read the literature and develop the outlines of a new media theory. Finally, and very importantly, thanks go to Dr Salah Eddin Elzein, then director of the Centre of Studies at Al Jazeera Broadcasting for his ongoing support, and to Al Jazeera itself, for funding this project, and thereby, making it possible. It is worth noting that Al Jazeera is the only Arab broadcasting company to date to have made available funds with no strings attached, for the pursuit of pure academic research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Stefano Allievi (2003) Islam in the Public Space: Social Networks, Media and Neo-Communities, in: Stefano Allievi & Jøren S. Nielsen (eds) Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and Across Europe, p. 2 (Leiden: Brill).

² Didier Bigo (2011) Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices, Practices of Power, International Political Sociology, 5, p. 234.

³ Etyen Mahçupyan, Introduction, in: Esra Elmas & Dilek Kurban (2011) Communicating Democracy—Democratising Communication, Media in Turkey: Legislation, Policies, Actors (Istanbul: Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation [TESEV]), p. 7.

⁴ Marshall McLuhan (1994) The Medium is the Message, in: Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 1–18.

⁵ Daren Butler & Humeyra Pamuk (2014) Turkish president rejects Facebook, YouTube ban over wiretaps, Reuters Report (March 7). Available at:https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-erdogan/turkish-president-rejects-facebook-youtube-ban-over-wiretaps-idUSBREA2609A20140307, accessed January 7, 2018.

⁶ Freedom House Country Report, Turkey, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2014/turkey, accessed 7 January 2018; for most recent ratings, see Freedom of the Press 2017, Turkey Profile, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2017/turkey, accessed January 7, 2018.

⁷ Karl Vick (2014) Turkey’s Erdogan Turns Off Twitter, Turns Up the Nationalism (March 21).Available at: http://time.com/33393/turkey-recep-tayyip-erdogan-twitter/, accessed January 7, 2018.

⁸ Judith Butler and Başak Ertür (2017) In Turkey, academics asking for peace are accused of terrorism, The Guardian (December 11). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/11/erdogan-turkey-academics-terrorism-violence-kurdish-people, accessed January 7, 2018.

⁹ Quote from Daniel Hallin & Paolo Mancini (2013) ‘Comparing Media Systems’ between Eastern and Western Europe, in Peter Gross & Karol Jakubowicz (eds) Media Transformations in the Post Communist World: Eastern Europe’s Tortured Path to Change, p. 19 (Plymouth: Lexington Books).

¹⁰ Daniel Hallin & Paolo Mancini (2004) Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, p. 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

¹¹ Ibid, p. 10.

¹² Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler & Michael Gurevitch, (1974) Utilization of Mass Communication by the Individual, in: Jay G. Blumler & Elihu Katz (eds) The Uses of Mass Communication: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research, pp. 19–34 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage).

¹³ Bernd Bucher (2014) Acting Abstractions: Metaphors, Narrative Structures, and the Eclipse of Agency, European Journal of International Relations, 20(3), pp. 742–765.

¹⁴ Adeel Malik & Bassim Awadallah (2013) The Economics of the Arab Spring, World Development, 45, pp. 296–313.

¹⁵ Tugba Basaran and Christian Olsson (2017) Becoming International: On Symbolic Capital, Conversion and Privilege, Millennium, Online First 4/11, p. 5. Available at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305829817739636, accessed November 17, 2017.

¹⁶ Quoted in Nicolae Kallos & Ovidiu Trasnea (1982) Political Values: Their Function and Status, International Political Science Review, 3(2), p. 185.

¹⁷ Francis Steen (2012) Causal Reasoning in the News: MIT CMS Colloquium and podcast, 02–09; http://vrnewsscape.ucla.edu/mind/2012-09-06_CMS_MIT_Steen.html; Steen employs the term causal surgery in place of ‘meaning management’ to describe television news media’s process of assessing evidence and presenting the factual as only one outcome of the possible.

¹⁸ Martha Finnemore & Kathryn Sikkink (1998) International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, International Organization, 52(4), International Organization at Fifty: Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (Autumn), pp. 887–917.

¹⁹ Margaret U. Walker (2000) Naturalizing, Normativity and Using What ‘We’ Know About Ethics, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 26, p. 89.

²⁰ Mohammed-Ali Abunajela & Noha Mellor (2016) Islam in the News: The case of Al Jazeera Arabic and the Muslim Brotherhood, in: Noha Mellor & Khalil Rinnawi (eds) Political Islam and Global Media: The boundaries of religious identity, p. 266 (London: Routledge).

²¹ N. Mellor (2016) Introduction, in Mellor & Rinnawi (eds) Political Islam and Global Media, p. 3.

²² Hallin & Mancini, Comparing Media Systems.

²³ Ipek Gencel Sezgin (2014) Islamist Party Identity in Right Wing Milieus: The Case of the National Outlook Movement in Kayseri (1960–1980), in: Kristina Kamp, Ayhan Kaya, E. Fuat Keyman & Özge Onursak Beşgül (eds) Contemporary Turkey at a Glance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Local and Translocal Dynamics, Open Access SpringerLink.com, pp. 93–110.