Media and democracy in Turkey: An analysis on the news media framing of Gezi Park protests

Abstract

Introduction Freedom of the press is typically considered crucial in fostering democracy and protecting the public interest; thus, it constitutes an indispensable measure for the quality of democracy and may be considered a hallmark of a consolidated democracy. Merkel’s (2004) notion of embedded democracy postulates press freedom as a critical aspect of political rights, which is one of the five partial regimes that support the proper functioning of an embedded liberal democracy. Those rights render the public sphere an independent field of political action in which communicative and organizational power is developed. Accordingly, a free press is a vital component of political communication and political parti-cipation through the distribution and reception of information; political social-ization of the public; the influencing of electoral decisions; and giving voice to interest groups. Within a liberal democratic framework the media’s democratic functions are idealized through two major expectations. First, the media should sustain the presence of multiple political voices (plurality). Second, it should impart information enabling the public to hold elected and appointed officials respons-ible for their actions (accountability). For example, both Walter Lippman and John Dewey (cited in Champlin and Knoedler 2006) attributed a considerable role to the media in a democracy. The former considered the media as an elite group that should evaluate the policies of government and convey information to the public regarding ongoing key debates. The latter viewed the media as a necessary instrument of democracy which should “figure out how to engage the entire public in decisions that would affect them in the end” (quoted in Fallows 1997: 237). However, it is difficult to argue that media discourse regularly meets these expectations, even in a consolidated democracy. The media do not always produce news that serves to enhance democracy due to issues such as patronage networks, distorted relationships between journalists and politicians, concentra-tion of media ownership, partisanship, and explicit political/ideological bias of media institutions. Indeed, rather than encouraging active citizenship and demo-cratic participation, the media generally function in a manner that promotes apathy, pessimism, conflict, and societal polarization. In Gamson et al.‘s (1992: 373) words, “all the trends seem to be in the wrong direction - toward more and more messages, from fewer and bigger producers, saying less and less. That’s the bad news.” Thus, far from the idea of objectivity, the media represent a realm of struggle in which the dominant powers compete and defend what they would prefer to have taken for granted by society. In other words, since media fol-lowers construct meanings about social and political issues via media-generated images of the world, media discourse is highly oriented toward finding support for competing constructions of reality. Within this framework, one may argue that the Turkish media are no excep-tion. Our main argument underpins the fact that, in the sense of plurality, media-generated frames may be compatible with democratic norms, and thus they may contribute to the consolidation of democracy and enhance democratic sensitivity. Yet, the very same frames may be utilized in an anti-democratic tonality, which would undermine the consolidation of democracy in any given context. What we mean by tonality is the construction of a frame. It connotes the underlying polit-ical and cultural fundamentals of a specific frame in terms of constructing and presenting the reality. We argue that the mere presence of variety in the sources of information and in the range of media content (e.g., multiple frames) cannot be interpreted as a sure sign of democracy or democratic consolidation. It is the nature of those voices (their tonality) that renders them democratic or antidemocratic. In this study, we will focus on the contents of the headline news reports of six newspapers during the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, which was a crucial social movement that generated competing news frames. The protests, which occurred between May and August, 2013, originated from a campaign against the destruc-tion of Gezi Park as part of the redevelopment of the Taksim area in Istanbul. On May 30, 2013 police intervened in a peaceful demonstration held by environ-mentalists in Gezi Park. The offensive response of the authorities touched a nerve and within a couple of days the protests spanned almost all provinces of Turkey. The cause of this great anger was not just the destruction of a park. It was also a reaction against the government’s increasingly authoritarian and exclusive attitude, suppressive tactics against opposition, and its unwillingness to respect different lifestyles. During the protests, the authorities provoked the anger by repeatedly showing intolerance of any form of protest. Regretfully, the mainstream national media, which had already been controlled by the govern-ment, exhibited self-censorship and conveyed little of the protests at the very beginning of the events. This directed people mostly to social media in order to communicate and learn about the events. In conducting this analysis, the headline news covered during that period will be coded in two ways. The first coding, following Toros (2012), will analyze the level of plurality within the Turkish media by employing the categories of pre-defined frames by Neuman et al. (1992) and Semetko and Valkenburg (2000), namely responsibility, human interest, conflict, morality, and economic frames. The second coding will focus on the tonality of those frames in terms of their compatibility with the norms of a liberal pluralistic democracy such as tolerance, equality, rule of law, justice, acceptance of cultural diversity, giving voice to multiple actors, respect for other lifestyles, opinions, and fundamental freedoms. © 2016 selection and editorial material, Cengiz Erisen and Paul Kubicek; individual chapters, the contributors.