Representation of Terror and Ethnic Conflict in the Turkish Press: An Analysis of the Peace Process in Turkey

Abstract

This article explores the representation of the Kurdish issue in Turkey’s media. It does so by focusing on four newspapers that are representative of different ideological stances and economic relations with the Turkish government. The time period is during two key events: the Kobanî protests in 2014 and the elections in 2015. The research findings indicate that the media’s framing of the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK is a contested discursive site; one determined not only by ideological affiliation but also by the relative politico-economic autonomy of the media institutions from the central political power.

Key Words:

• Frame theory
• Kurdish issue
• Peace process in Turkey
• Terror discourse
• Turkish media

This article focuses on the representation of terror and ethnic conflict in the Turkish media during the collapse of the ‘solution process,’ which the Justice and Development Party (AKP) originally initiated in 2013. The literature on the Turkish media suggests that the official declaration of a ‘solution process’ created a significant discursive shift in the way the Kurdish issue was framed in Turkish mainstream media.¹ Starting from 2010, the organizational leadership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its important administrative staff became visible actors in Turkish politics through interviews, public media declarations and commentaries, while the terms ‘terror organization’ or ‘terrorist,’ commonly used to describe the PKK were, after many years, left aside. This discursive shift held great significance: How can it be understood in terms of journalistic practice, whether as an opportunity to serve the building of peace in Turkey, or as an attempt to comply with the discursive and political shifts within the state discourse regarding the Kurdish issue, is the subject here.

The analysis focuses on two ruptures in the solution process: the Kobanî protests in October 2014 and the period between March and November 2015 when the peace talks between the PKK and Turkish state stumbled and the skirmishes between the two parties resumed at breakneck speed not only in rural areas but also in the city centers. This period also saw two further key developments: First the increasing tide of the Syrian war, which radically restructured the other side of the southeastern border of Turkey, including Kurdish areas; and second, a domestic politics that became highly polarized between the AKP and opposition parties during the period between the June and November 2015 elections. Throughout the analysis, I discuss how media institutions’ own ideological and politico-economic stances determined the representation of the Kurdish issue and revealed the increasingly polarized politics gripping Turkish society.

Theory: Framing War and Peace

An important body of literature deals with the role of media in conflict societies. As the research on conflict resolution indicates, media can play an effective role not only in fueling a conflict by reinforcing differences—or in some cases through direct manipulation, but also in facilitating post-conflict recovery and ethnic reconciliation during periods of peace building.² Frame theory, which focuses on how a conflict is ‘framed’ through ‘certain keywords, stock phrases, stereotyped images, sources of information, and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts or judgments,’³ holds a significant place in media scholarship on peace and war.⁴ According to Robert Entman, media frames serve to select ‘some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text.’⁵ That is media frames define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments and then predict their likely effects.⁶

Although the frame perspective provides a comprehensive approach to discuss general trends in news coverage (such as drama, simplicity, ethnocentrism) and their discordance with the articulation of a peace discourse,⁷ it fails to address the broader politico-economic context, which gives shape to the frames themselves and the ways they construct moral political judgments in a given media environment. Local political history (the repertoire of symbols and signifiers through which frames are constructed) as well as the local media structure (ownership, legal context, state-media relations, existence of transnational media, and so on) are equally important for understanding how the media constructs a certain approach to conflict and/or peace. Turkish media has been divided not only by ideological differences but also by the economic relations between the media owners and the central government, making it important to question the media’s positionality within this web of power relations.⁸

In the Turkish media, the Kurdish issue has been primarily framed with reference to a repertoire of notions such as national security, separatism and specifically terror, leading Nilgün Tutal Cheviron and Aydın Çam to describe it as ‘absolutely the most speculative and ambiguous concept in Turkish political history.’⁹ The equivocal nature of these terms as well as their widespread circulation and history within different political projects have turned them into contested concepts reflecting power struggles and attendant discursive shifts in Turkish politics. My analysis of the framing of the Kurdish issue shows that despite the emergence of a moderate media discourse on the PKK and the Kurdish issue during the peace talks in 2013, a significant lapse back to the old narratives of terror and national security occurred in certain media outlets following the change of discourse of the central government after March 2015. This shift and the lack of a coherent peace discourse only can be understood with reference to the specificity of media-government relations in Turkey, where the political elites always have attempted to regulate the media’s discourse. This effort has occurred either through censorship and legal pressures or economic and business-oriented interests of media owners close to central authority.¹⁰

As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have argued, the media engage with other institutional sectors in ownership and management and thus cannot remain analytically detached from the interests of political and economic elites, particularly as many members of the media are constitutive of those elites.¹¹ The academic literature on the Turkish media has analyzed closely the economic and political ties between central governments and media moguls in the 1990s.¹² Similarly, the newly emerging elites who have built their business empires during AKP rule have made significant media acquisitions in the last decade.¹³ Regarding the radical transformation of the economic field in Turkey under the AKP, Ayşe Buğra and Osman Savaşkan observed that the media sector has become ‘an area where business people do not just receive favors from, but actually do favors for, the government.’¹⁴ In sum, my analysis is built upon two theoretical frameworks: (1) the media play a constitutive role in the framing of perceptions; and (2) framing is part of a contested discursive site, which is shaped through power struggles among different politico-economic actors attempting to control the meanings and definitions attached to certain terms, such as national security, separatism, peace and/or terror.

Operationalization of Data and Selection of Cases

To highlight variations in framing representations of the Kurdish issue, four newspapers were chosen for a discursive analysis: Yeni Şafak, Hürriyet, Zaman, and Cumhuriyet. These four national dailies represent different political and ideological affiliations while also showing variation in ownership structure (see Table 1). Both Yeni Şafak [New dawn] and Zaman [Time, now closed] reflected strong Islamic values, although their economic and political connections with the central government were almost diametrically opposite to each other, which had important consequences in the run-up to and period immediately after the attempted coup in 2016.¹⁵ Despite being a major high-circulation daily, the government confiscated Zaman and placed it into trusteeship on March 4, 2016, then closed it by a special law-decree on July 27, 2016. Hürriyet [Freedom] and Cumhuriyet [Republic] are among the traditional newspapers founded in the early years of the Republic. They both have adhered to secular, national and liberal values, although both have suffered severe attacks from AKP supporters, and Cumhuriyet’s staff members have been brought before the judiciary on grounds of inciting ‘terrorism.’¹⁶

Table 1. Ideological bent and ownership structure of newspapers (November 2016)

Newspaper	Ideological bent	Relations with central government	Ownership*	Outcome
Zaman	Islamist/Gülenist	In conflict	Feza Group	Closed
Hürriyet	Secular/Mainstream	In conflict	Doğan Group	Reduced in size
Yeni Şafak	Islamist/ mainstream	Pro-government	Albayrak Group	Small but growing
Cumhuriyet	Secular/Liberal	In conflict	Cumhuriyet Foundation	On trial

* The Doğan and Albayrak groups have investments in sectors such as energy, tourism and industry, whereas the Feza Group operates only in the media sector. The Cumhuriyet Foundation is non-profit. See further Ceren Sözeri & Zeynep Güney (2011) The Political Economy of the Media in Turkey. A Sectoral Analysis (TESEV); see also the corporate media chart in Tunç’s article in this issue.

The analysis here focuses on newspaper stories published over two periods that together cover 10 months: October 1–31, 2014 (surrounding the Kobanî protests, the first significant instance of unrest after the start of the peace talks) and March 1 to October 31, 2015 (the national election period during which the AKP discourse can be seen to shift significantly). The Kobanî protests in Kurdish cities are included in the collection of data since this period of severe unrest constitutes an important turning point in relations between the Kurdish movement and the AKP government. This period also constitutes the re-emergence of Kurdish cities as ‘zones of terror and insecurity’ in the media discourse, subsequent to two years of framing the Kurdish issue and the Kurdish region in more neutral terms during the peace process. The election period constitutes a significant rupture in the course of peace talks and a full return to framing the Kurdish issue in terms of separatism, insecurity and terror.

The four newspapers were scanned for all articles in which appeared the keywords ‘terror,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘security,’ ‘peace,’ and ‘peace process.’ The original sample size of 2,084 articles published in these nine months, then was reduced by focusing only on those that discussed these keywords with reference to the Kurdish issue, Kurdish political parties in Turkey and the PKK. Whenever a given article appeared on the front page and continued on subsequent pages, the entire article was analyzed. The final sample size contained 738 articles.

Historical overview: Politico-Legal Context and Representation of Kurdish Issue in Mainstream Media

Turkish nationalism, which was based on the ideal of creating a homogenous homeland, excluded many ethnic categories from power (such as Christian populations) and rendered other Muslim ethnic categories invisible.¹⁷ Throughout the history of the Republic, terror, security and separatism have served as contested ideas pointing to different ethnic, religious or political categories in different time periods. The long-lasting hate discourse regarding the non-Muslim populations of the dissolved Ottoman Empire (Armenians, Jews, Christians and Rum populations) and the threat of radical political Islam and Islamic identity in the 1990s¹⁸ take their cues from the slippery ground on which the ambiguous definitions of security and public order are made. Although, hate discourse regarding the Kurds as an ethnic category declined before again rising over the past five years,¹⁹ the PKK and Kurdish political parties continued to be the most persistent categories associated with terrorism in Turkish political and media discourse, often providing a benchmark against which other organizations labeled as terrorist, could be measured.

Starting from the foundation of the Republic, the ‘east’ of the country was framed as a zone of chaos in which security and territorial integrity had to be preserved through military means. The Kurds as an ethnic identity were referred to as ‘prospective Turkish citizens’ who should give up their ethnic identity and publicly adopt Turkish ethnicity.²⁰ The Kurd as a domestic ethnic category was almost absent in mainstream media before the late 1980s. The press only started recognizing the Kurds in the mid-1980s after the emergence of the PKK onto the Turkish political scene;²¹ however, discussions around Kurdish ethnic identity and Kurdish cultural rights primarily were framed through references to separatism and terror.²² The media coverage of the Kurdish issue through the 1990s was characterized by complete state control.²³ The media were forced to frame the conflicts by replacing prohibited words with ‘appropriate’ ones: ‘PKK’ was prohibited whereas ‘the terrorist organization PKK’ and ‘the bloody terrorist organization’ were offered as appropriate.²⁴ In this state-centric frame, Abdullah Öcalan (the jailed leader of the PKK) was referred to as the ‘head of the disrupters’ or ‘the baby-killer,’ and ‘treason’ and ‘separatism’ became the main keywords through which the Kurdish issue was constructed—all of which reflected the hegemonic control of the state over the discursive field surrounding the issue.²⁵

A repertoire of laws and regulations backed up this rigid form of nationalism and partly determines the ways the Turkish media framed and represented the Kurdish issue. For instance, during the 1990s, Articles 311 and 312 of the Turkish Penal Code, Articles 6 and 7 of the Fight Against Terrorism Law and Article 4 of the Law Regarding the Constitution of Radio and TV comprised the main legal frameworks that determined the representation of the Kurdish issue.²⁶ As Dilek Kurban and Ceren Sözeri argue, domestic courts fail to draw a distinction between reporting on terrorism and producing terrorist propaganda.²⁷ As such, by the end of 2011, an estimated 3,000–5,000 journalists nationwide were prosecuted under the Penal Code and the Anti-Terror Law, with 70 percent of these having been reporting in media outlets connected with the Kurdish political movement.²⁸

The Kurdish Issue During AKP Rule

At the time he took office in 2003, Tayyip Erdoğan emphasized that the AKP might address the Kurdish question in Turkey on the basis of cultural rights and democratic demands. This stemmed from the EU accession process that became an important reference point for Islamic intellectuals and politicians after the February 28 events.²⁹ Moreover, it also could be seen as an attempt by political Islamic politicians to consolidate the Kurdish electorate into their own hegemonic project and to discredit the Kurdish movement of the 1990s, which radically challenged the secular and Kemalist hegemony together with Islamist parties. In 2009, the government duly launched the Kurdish Initiative, known formerly as the Kurdish Opening, and later referred to variously as the Democratic Opening, the National Unity Project, and the Democratic Initiative, among others, which aimed to solve the Kurdish question through ‘more freedom and more democracy.’³⁰ In 2009, the state-owned broadcaster TRT devoted one TV channel and one radio station to 24-hour Kurdish broadcasts. Yet, despite these important developments, in December 2009, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) was closed for ‘being a center of activities against the unity of the state and the nation.’ ³¹

That same year there occurred a wave of detentions and arrests of Kurdish politicians on the grounds they were members of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), the urban organization of the PKK in Kurdish cities. In the two years leading up to 2011, more than 2,000 people (mostly Kurdish politicians) were arrested.³²

These contradictory policies epitomized the government’s attitude toward the Kurdish issue: on the one hand, attempting to secure a position as the sole actor of the peace process in Turkey, while on the other, pursuing ongoing demonization and exclusion of the Kurdish political movement. What is more, these two trajectories have shaped the way the Turkish media approached the Kurdish political parties.³³ Yet, on March 21, 2013, a letter by Öcalan was read out publicly in Diyarbakır³⁴ to hundreds of thousands who had gathered to celebrate Newroz, the beginning of the Kurdish New Year. Öcalan, whom the state had labeled as ‘head separatist’ or ‘terrorist chieftain’ in the political lexicon of the 1990s, addressed not only the Kurdish crowds in Diyarbakır but also the whole country through live broadcasting. This moment was a turning point in Turkish history, as enabling this national broadcast constituted the most significant and visible step taken by a Turkish government toward the path of an inclusive peace process. This radical shift in discursive practice did not last through the year, however. The first fracture occurred over the Kobanî protests.

The Kobanî Protests: Return to Terror Discourse

The Syrian war had a dramatic impact on the course of peace talks in Turkey. The Kobanî protests constituted a moment when the scope of this impact came to the surface. The Kobanî protests refer to large-scale protests in Kurdish cities in the southeastern part of Turkey in October 2014, which erupted as a response to the siege of the town of Kobanî, which lies on the border of Syria and Turkey, by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL). The Kurdish protests lasted approximately 10 days, during which more than 30 civilians lost their lives. Conflicts not only were between Turkish security forces and the protestors but also between the members of a far-right Kurdish Islamist Free Cause [Hüdapar] party³⁵ and the PKK.

During the Kobanî protests, all dailies under scrutiny except Cumhuriyet reinstated the sensationalist discourse toward the Kurdish issue that had predominated in the 1990s. In 41 articles published in October 2014, Yeni Şafak framed the Kurdish protestors as being the ‘enemies of Turkey,’ ‘terrorists,’ ‘members of the terrorist organization that utilizes ISIL’s occupation of Kobanî as an excuse,’ a ‘chaos lobby,’ and ‘PKK supporters who terrorize the streets.’ In a similar vein, Zaman devoted 30 articles to the Kobanî riots, framing its coverage in a very similar discourse to that of Yeni Şafak. Stating that the ‘supporters of the terror organization have burnt the streets of cities in southeastern Turkey,’ the daily framed the protestors as ‘terrorists,’ and ‘supporters of the separatist terrorist organization.’ The epitome of mainstream secular and liberal newspapers, Hürriyet, ring-fenced its sensational language, but nonetheless noted that ‘terrorists from the rural cadres of the PKK’ had come to the city centers and taken over the streets, an attempt to distinguish ‘the players in the peace process’ from ‘the more militant groups’ active in Kobanî. In contrast, Cumhuriyet utilized the word ‘protestors’ rather than ‘terrorists’ in framing the conflict and adopted a consistently less polarizing tone, stating the protestors had taken to the streets to protest against the AKP’s foreign policy toward Syria. The daily framed the larger issue as a more existential threat, editorially expressing the fear of going back to the 1990s when extrajudicial killings and an internecine armed conflict reigned in the Kurdish region.

Officially, the Kurdish issue had long been framed as part of domestic politics, a hegemonic discourse that the government insisted the media reflect. During the Kobanî protests, however, the media started covering the inner dynamics of the Syrian war in a more detailed way as the Syrian Kurdish Militia, the YPG (Peoples’ Protection Units in Syria), and ISIL emerged as important actors, affecting not only the course of the Syrian war but also the course of peace talks in Turkey. The news discourse on the representation of the PKK, ISIL and YPG is not consistent across papers, and even varied radically within the editorial line of a single newspaper. During the Kobanî protests and later during the election period in 2015 (analyzed below) Cumhuriyet was cautious in using the term ‘terrorist,’ offering more neutral frames. For example, the daily used terms such as ‘members of the PKK,’ ‘a group from PKK,’ and ‘protestors’ instead of ‘terrorists.’ In contrast, Yeni Şafak, due to its close affiliation with AKP elites, liberally used the term ‘terrorist’ for members of the PKK and ‘militant’ for ISIL and YPG members, drawing discursive distinctions but classifying them all as endangering the homeland. Zaman and Hürriyet, despite different ideological viewpoints (Gülenist-Islamist and secular-mainstream, respectively) shared common nationalist concerns, and both more consistently utilized the terms ‘terror’ and ‘terrorist’ for members of all the groups, lumping them into a single frame of militancy and illegality. This also partly can be explained by the fact that the Gülen movement never had supported the thaw with the PKK or the talks with Öcalan, and Zaman conformed to that view from the outset.³⁶

It was not unusual, at this time, to see irregular and haphazard usage of the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terror organization’ appearing even in the same newspaper, indicating internal struggles over how the issue ought to be framed. For instance, in the 84 articles analyzed from Cumhuriyet in 2014 and 2015, a small but significant number of articles (10 percent) used the term ‘terrorist’ to define the PKK despite the apparent editorial decision of the daily to omit the term ‘terrorist’ in most of its coverage.³⁷ This raises an important question: How did the internal dynamics of editorial processes and the newsroom determine the way the conflict would be framed?³⁸ Although journalists’ relative level of agency to challenge or alter official modes of representation during this period had declined tremendously in the face of both government and corporate pressure, these haphazard and irregular usages indicate internal contestations between editors and reporters over the representation of this issue, and the unsettled nature of the hegemonic discourse at the time.

The Election Period (March to November 2015): Instrumentalizing the Terror Concept

The second significant rupture regarding the course of peace talks occurred right before the June 7, 2015 parliamentary election. March 2015 saw a radical about-face by the government and Erdoğan when he stated that the ‘solution process’ had not been ‘on the right path.’³⁹ This was followed by numerous attacks on the headquarters of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) in various cities and an ISIL bombing during the HDP rally in Diyarbakır a few days before the election. Another attack in July claimed by ISIL and targeting the gathering of youth wings of socialist institutions⁴⁰ in Suruç (a town bordering Syria),⁴¹ fueled sporadic clashes between the PKK and the Turkish army that lasted through April 2015. Between July and November 2015, armed conflicts between the PKK and the Turkish army reached a peak, leaving thousands of casualties including security forces, PKK members and civilians.

Dominant values of news writing (immediacy, drama, simplicity and ethnocentrism) are not easily compatible with the articulation of a peace discourse as they tend toward exaggeration and an emphasis on victimhood and demonization.⁴² The rising tide of skirmishes between Turkish security forces and the PKK aggravated the tone of reporting. The increase in news space devoted to the skirmishes correlated with a search for drama and appeal to the emotions, which became apparent in the coverage of the death of soldiers between June and November 2015. Sensational news stories about the soldiers, their ‘martyrdom,’ and the terms ‘terror’ and ‘terrorist’ tended to be used with stock references and vivid framing language such as ‘trap,’ ‘ambush,’ ‘treacherous’ and ‘treason.’⁴³

In the period analyzed, both the government and the media saw enemies as diversifying and increasing in number. The argument over the proliferation of enemies went hand in hand with the scenario of ‘coalitions’ possibly forming among them, which provided a new frame for presenting the Kurdish issue. As then-Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu stated in 2015: ‘An invisible hand bonded the opposition.’⁴⁴ A close adherent of state discourse and values, the newspaper Yeni Şafak framed the concept of terror in line with the enemies of the state. Between March and November 2015, following the official discourse, Yeni Şafak argued that alliances existed between the various groups amidst—and despite—their apparently incompatible ideological and political affiliations, seeing collusion among ISIL, the YPG, the Gülen community, the Kemalist opposition party CHP, the pro-Kurdish opposition party HDP, the nationalist opposition party MHP, the PKK and Hürriyet’s publisher the Doğan media group and its owner Aydın Doğan. The headlines often were jeering in tone and accusatory, for example, on May 8, ‘CHP, HDP and Parallel State (referring to the Gülen movement) should be Co-chairs of a Party’ and on September 8, ‘The leader of MHP speaks the language of Aydın Doğan.’⁴⁵

The discourse on internal enemies likewise was blended into a single frame, merging what were historically external threats and enemies within Turkish nationalism and political Islam. These now included Jewish and Armenian lobbies⁴⁶ and Israel,⁴⁷ which consistently had been framed as persistent external enemies against a ‘powerful Turkey’; likewise Iran, due to its strong role in regional politics (particularly Syria) and its conflicting interests with the AKP government was pinpointed as an impediment in the ‘fight against terror.’ As headlined by Yeni Şafak on August 8, 2015, ‘Tehran is against the weakening of the PKK.’ In official discourse, as reflected in Yeni Şafak’s framing, terror had become an overarching symbol serving two purposes at the same time: First, it became a means for disciplining and silencing political opposition and critical media outlets; and second, it served to create ‘otherness’ as a national control mechanism that enabled the media to generate or redirect existing fear.⁴⁸

In this election period, ‘supporting terrorism’ became a label to which media groups were obliged to respond by proving their patriotism and hostility to terror and terrorist activities. Hürriyet, occupying a mainstream secular position, devoted significant space to proving its distance from terrorism and terrorist activities, fending off demonizing accusations by the pro-government dailies including Yeni Şafak and by Erdoğan himself.⁴⁹ In September 2015, the daily published a letter by its owner, Aydın Doğan, addressing Erdoğan directly. In the letter, Doğan responded to the accusations, and stressed that Doğan media always had been strongly against terrorism.⁵⁰ In October 2015, Doğan publicly announced that Hürriyet and his media group stood equidistant from all the political parties—implying that proximity was an inappropriate place for the media.⁵¹

Zaman, reflecting its close ties to Fethullah Gülen’s movement,⁵² adopted a more aggressive tone. The daily harshly criticized the government for failing to distinguish between what it called terrorists (PKK supporters) and patriots of the Turkish state (i.e., Gülenists). In May 2015, the AKP government directed major operations against schools and associations related to the Gülen movement. Zaman framed these actions in terms of wrongful policies toward the Gülen movement and linked them to the AKP’s fight against the PKK and its ongoing skirmishes in the southeast. Many of its news stories stated that the AKP was failing to combat the PKK because of these misguided policies against the Gülen movement. On April 2, 2015, an article discussed how the AKP had pressured the national intelligence service to spy on police officials rather than on terror organizations.⁵³ It criticized the detention of police officers related to the Gülen movement, noting many had been trained to fight against terror and were needed for national security.

To justify the wrongfulness of the government’s attacks, the daily made recourse to sensationalist contrasts of villains versus victims, specifically terrorists versus philanthropists. In Zaman’s articles, activities of the movement were framed as ‘philanthropic’ as for example: ‘In our country people who support education are not called terrorists’(May 7); ‘People [AKP government] who bargain with terror organizations see philanthropists as enemies’ (May 8); ‘Operations mounted against philanthropist businessmen while terror reigns over the country’ (June 24); and, pointedly, ‘Raid the PKK offices rather than schools, so that my children won’t be killed by the PKK’ (August 19). In a similar vein, the daily accused the AKP of failing to monitor the PKK during the ceasefire agreed between the two after the Solution Process began in 2013: ‘PKK Killed our Martyrs with bombs furnished it during the Solution Process’ (September 23); and ‘[Military] Operations against the PKK were prevented during the Peace Process’ (October 6). It is interesting to note the growing divergence between the discourses and values expressed by the government and the Gülenists in this period, as tension built up between them, leading to the failed coup attempt in July 2016.

Conclusion

This article has examined the media discourse on ethnic conflict and terror in the Turkish media surrounding the Kurdish issue. The two primary factors considered regarding the formation of the media discourse were the framing of the peace process and the struggle over the fixing of hegemonic meanings to the terms associated with the Kurdish issue before, during and after the Solution Process. Additionally, the relative politico-economic autonomy of different media from the central political power (i.e., different positioning of actors within the media field in terms of ideological affiliations and the resources this implies) was considered as important context for understanding unfolding developments. Throughout, examples from the media scene were employed to discuss how media discourse on terror should not be taken as a unified totalizing field but one in which a varying repertoire of symbols and signifiers was used by different actors in defining the conflict, and in particular, the key periods of the Kobanî protests and the parliamentary election of 2015. A key outcome of the research is that the framing of the Kurdish issue can be seen as having been a strategic tool in the hands of media groups for propagating their own ideological stance and attacking opponents. In this sense, the representation of the peace process illustrates a highly polarized domestic politics.

The analysis showed that two other factors impacted the framing of the Kurdish conflict: the building rift between the Gülen community and the AKP government; and the shifting power balances of the government in response to the Syrian war. The internal ideological pressures that erupted with the standoff between the AKP and the Gülen movement meant that a field of ‘enemies’ could be framed together into a single, multi-headed threat to national security; and any media stance that questioned or indeed investigated the alternative was itself endangered by being framed by the government as representing unacceptable values, including terrorism, as the Doğan group, parent of Hürriyet discovered. The economic dependency of many media barons on the government, and the coercive and disciplinary pressures by those in power on oppositional media outlets and voices together formed a context in which the framing of the Kurdish issue was entrenched. Finally, the increased instability along the southern border as it related to the Syrian war and the associated impact of emerging actors such as ISIL and YPG significantly affected the language and symbolic framing by the media in terms of drama and sensationalism, which contributed to the about-face in the way the Kurdish issue was politicized.

This brings forward two important issues for further research. First is the matter of the autonomy of Turkish media in its capacity to facilitate ethnic reconciliation as a discourse on peace. Second is a more analytical question related to the necessity of more comprehensive analyses of media frames in relation to topics as controversial and visceral as ethnic conflict or terror that includes not only content and discourse analysis, but also the contextualization of these media frames within broader politico-economic processes and transformations in Turkey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgement

This research for this article was made possible through the generous support of the Al Jazeera Media Corporation and the University of Cambridge–Al Jazeera Media Project.

Notes

¹ Esra Arsan (2014) 'Savaşı ve barışı Çerçevelemek: Türk ve Kürt basınında Öteki acının tanıklığı' [Framing War and Peace: Witnessing the other Pain in Turkish and Kurdish press], in Yasemin İnceoğlu & S. Çoban (eds) Azınlıklar, Ötekiler ve Medya [Minorities, Others and Media] (İstanbul: Ayrıntı), pp. 144–165.

² Seow Ting Lee (2010) Peace Journalism: Principles and Structural Limitations in the News Coverage of Three Conflicts, Mass Communication and Society, 13, pp. 361–384.

³ Robert Entman (1993) Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43, pp. 51–2.

⁴ Lars Willnat, A. Aw, N. Hamdy, Z. He, V. Menayang, M. La Porte, K. Sanders & E. Tamam (2006) Media use, anti-Americanism and international support for the Iraq War, International Communication Gazette, 68, pp. 533–550; Stuart Allan & B. Zelizer (eds) (2004) Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime (London: Routledge); and Gadi Wolfsfeld (2004) Media and the Path to Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

⁵ R. Entman, Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm, p. 52.

⁶ Ibid, pp. 51–52.

⁷ G. Wolfsfeld (1997) Promoting Peace Through the News Media: Some Initial Lessons from the Peace Process, Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 2, pp. 52–70; Wolfsfeld, Media and the Path to Peace.

⁸ See Asli Tunç’s article in this special issue.

⁹ Nilgun Cheviron & Aydin Çam (2016) NTV Yayınlarında 10 Ekim 2015: Ankara Gar Katliamının İşlenişi [October 10, 2015 in NTV Broadcasting: Coverage of Ankara Train Station Massacre], in Disk Basin-Is, Medyada 10 Ekim Katliamı [10 October Massacre in Media], p. 91.

¹⁰ Ceren Sözeri (2013) The Political Economy of the Media and its Impact on the Freedom of Expression in Turkey, in: Carmen Rodrigez, A. Avalos & H. Yılmaz (eds) Turkey’s Democratization Process (London: Routledge), pp. 391–405.

¹¹ Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon).

¹² Christian Christensen (2007) Breaking the News: Concentration of Ownership, the Fall of Unions and Government Legislation in Turkey, Global Media and Communication, 3, pp. 179–199; see also the articles by Asli Tunç and Farmanfarmaian, Sonay and Akser in this issue.

¹³ Ayse Buğra & O. Savaşkan (2014) New Capitalism in Turkey: The Relation Between Politics, Religion and Business (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing).

¹⁴ Ibid, p. 99.

¹⁵ The Albayrak Group, a firm that has grown substantially under AKP rule, owns Yeni Şafak. The Feza Group owned Zaman, which had close ties to the Fethullah Gülen movement, and which since 2016 the Turkish state has defined as a terrorist organization (Fethullah Terrorist Organization/FETO). The Gülen movement was accepted as one of the central figures of the Islamic movement in Turkey. Since the 1980s, through its political alliances, the Gülen movement developed a wide media network and an educational network, which consisted of 500 schools and six universities in Turkey and a presence in 92 countries. The movement is shaped by strong references to Turkish nationalism, free market liberalism and Islamic conservatism. See Michelangelo Guida’s article in this special issue for a detailed discussion.

¹⁶ See Aslı Tunç in this special issue for details on Cumhuriyet and Hürriyet; see also the article by Roxane Farmanfarmaian, Ali Sonay and Mehmet Akser in this issue.

¹⁷ Nergis Canefe (2002) Turkish Nationalism and Ethno-Symbolic Analysis: The Rules of Exception, Nation and Nationalism, 8, pp. 133–155.

¹⁸ The discourse on the emergence of İrtica (Reactionism/Radical Islam) has been a strong source of polarization, especially during the 1990s when Islamic politics was on the rise in the Turkish political arena. In 1997, deeming the electoral success of the Islamist Welfare Party (RP) as a threat to the foundational principles of the Turkish Republic, the military forced the RP-led coalition to dissolve and banned the RP and its president, Necmettin Erbakan, from politics. The infamous 28 February process known as the post-modern coup in Turkish history—was described as an attempt to protect the secular regime against ‘dark forces’ and to destroy their ‘nests.’ See Milliyet (1997) İrtica PKK’dan Tehlikeli [Radical Islam is more dangerous than the PKK] (25 February). The 28 February decision marked the beginning of an official anti-Islamic campaign initiated and executed by the military and judiciary. Then Chief of Staff General Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu launched this campaign by saying that ‘February 28 is a process [...] that will last a thousand years if necessary.’ Quoted in Yildiz Atasoy (2009) Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism: State Transformation in Turkey (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 89.

¹⁹ Idil Engindeniz & N. Mutluer (2013) Medyada Nefret Söylemi ve Ayrımcı Dil: Eylül-Aralık 2013, [Hate Discourse and Discriminatory Language in Media: September–December 2013] (İstanbul: Hrant Dink Vakfı); Irem Az., N. Gelişli, R. Barak, R. & Z. Arslan (2014) Medyada Nefret Söylemi ve Ayrımcı Dil: Mayıs-Ağustos 2014, [Hate Discourse and Discriminatory Language in Media: May–August 2014] (İstanbul: Hrant Dink Vakfı).

²⁰ Mesut Yeğen (2006) Müstakbel Türk’ten Sözde Vatandaşa [From Prospective Turks to the So-called Citizens] (Istanbul: Iletişim).

²¹ Murat Somer (2005) Resurgence and Remaking of Identity: Civil Beliefs, Domestic and External Dynamics, and the Turkish Mainstream Discourse on Kurds, Comparative Political Studies, 38, pp. 591–622.

²² Arsan, Savaşı ve Barışı Çerçevelemek [Framing War and Peace].

²³ Erbil Tüşalp (1999) Sansürlü Sözcükler [Censored Words], Milliyet (May 20).

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Esra Ercan-Bilgiç (2008) Vatan, Millet, Reyting: Televizyon Haberlerinde Milliyetçilik, [Nation, People, Rating: Nationalism in TV news] (İstanbul: Evrensel Basım).

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ See Dilek Kurban & Ceren Sözeri (2014) The State of the Journalistic Profession in Turkey, in: Evangelia Psychogiopoulou (ed.) Media Policies Revisited (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 191–205.

²⁸ Sözeri, The Political Economy of the Media. See also the article by Farmanfarmaian, Sonay and Akser in this special issue.

²⁹ William Hale & E. Özbudun (2010) Islamism, democracy and liberalism in Turkey: The Case of the AKP (London: Routledge), p. 28. For the February 28 events, see footnote 18.

³⁰ BBC Turkey (2005) Kürt sorunu benim sorunum [Kurdish Problem is my Problem] (12 August).

³¹ Behzat Miser (2009) Beş parti kapatıldı, deneyimli DTP'nin yedeği hazır: BDP [Five parties are banned. Experienced DTP has a backup: BDP] Radikal (December 12).

³² Fatih Yağmur (2012) KCK'da 2000 Tutuklu [2,000 arrests in KCK] in Radikal (July 1).

³³ Derya Erdem (2013) The Representation of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) in the Mainstream Turkish Media, in: Cengiz Gunes & W. Zeydanlioglu (eds) The Kurdish Question in Turkey (London: Routledge), pp. 47–68.

³⁴ A city that had symbolic importance for Kurds living in the Kurdish region of southeast Turkey.

³⁵ Hüdapar [Hür Dava Partisi] was founded in 2012 and known to have affiliations with another militant group, the Kurdish Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organization in Turkey. The Kurdish Hezbollah was active until 2002 and believed to have been utilized and actively supported by the Turkish government against the PKK in the 1990s. During the Kobanî protests, the death toll rose due to the armed conflicts between supporters of the PKK and Hüdapar.

³⁶ See Michelangelo Guida in this issue for more on the Gülen and Zaman.

³⁷ It also should be noted that Cumhuriyet went through a radical transformation in its editorial staff in the last three years, eliminating much of its Kemalist/nationalist discourse.

³⁸ Ozan Aşık (2016) Representing the Nation: An Analysis of Strategic Performativity and Human Agency in the Everyday Newswork of Journalists, in: H. Yaldır, E. Zuzanska-Zysko & M. Arsla (eds) Current Topics in Social Sciences (Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press), pp. 521–530.

³⁹ Hürriyet (2015) Erdoğan: 10 Maddenin Neresini Kabul Edecegim? [Erdoğan: What shall I Accept in these 10 Articles?] (22 March).

⁴⁰ The youth wing of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP); and the Socialist Youth Associations Federation (SGDF).

⁴¹ Milliyet (2015) Suruç'ta korkunç patlama [Dreadful Explosion in Suruc] (20 July).

⁴² Wolfsfeld, Media and the Path to Peace, pp. 40–42.

⁴³ A few examples from the headlines: Cumhuriyet (2015) ‘The most bloody trap,’ August 20); Hürriyet (2015) ‘Another Treacherous Ambush’ (September 4); Zaman (2015) ‘Ambush with mines’ (August 2); and Yeni Şafak (2015) ‘Treacherous Ambush’ (August 16).

⁴⁴ Yeni Şafak (2015) Muhalefeti gizli bir el birleştirdi [An invisible hand bonded the opposition] (30 May).

⁴⁵ Further examples from Yeni Şafak (2015): ‘The politics of Demirtaş is the soul mate of CHP’ (March 19); ‘Demirtaş and Bahçeli are soul mates’ (September 11); ‘The well of treason: Doğan-Petrol-Terror Triangle’ (September 3); ‘FETÖ and PKK met 6 times’ (October 30); and ‘Alliance between Doğan Group and Parallel (referring to Gülen movement)’ (September 6).

⁴⁶ Yeni Şafak (2015) ‘HDP met Jewish lobby’ (October 29); and ‘Armenian lobby is in charge’ (June 8).

⁴⁷ Yeni Şafak (2015) ‘Davutoğlu: Parallel Gang, CHP and HDP: They speak the language of Israel’ (May 6).

⁴⁸ E. Herman & N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, p. 41.

⁴⁹ In an interview broadcast by Kanal 7 on September 22, Erdoğan criticized Aydın Doğan quoting him as saying during a meeting at an Istanbul hotel years prior: ‘There were times when we made governments come and go.’

⁵⁰ Hürriyet (2015) ‘Dogan: Ben hiç kimseye öyle birşey demedim’ [Dogan: I did not say such a thing to anyone] (September 26).

⁵¹ Hürriyet (2015) ‘Bütün partilere eşit mesafedeyiz’ [We stand at an equal distance from all political parties] (October 3).

⁵² See article by Michelangelo Guida in this issue for a detailed discussion.

⁵³ Zaman (2015) İstihbaratçılar terör örgütleriyle değil, polisler ve aileleriyle uğraşıyo. [Intelligence Service investigate police officials and their families rather than terror organizations] (February 5).