This article presents how the rise of Justice and Development Party (AKP) to political power in Turkey transformed journalists’ professional practices as to lead to a decline in the plurality of opinions presented in the media. After AKP’s second electoral victory in 2007, political trials, property transfers, and dismissals wrapped in a discourse of punishment and purge of the “nation’s enemies” destabilized long established power hierarchies of secularists, religious-conservatives, Kurds, and leftists in Turkey. The destabilization was caused by the state’s changing attitude toward these identity groups, and in the media it lead to shifts in journalists’ status positions and emotions. Varying professional responses triggered by these shifts explain the convergence to a dominant singular political narrative in the media. This argument builds on narrative evidence collected between 2012 and 2014 via in-depth interviews, newspaper articles, and journalists’ memoires. With a from-below account, the article presents the effects of destabilized hierarchies on journalistic practice. In the example of media, it invites scholars to rethink contemporary democratic backsliding in terms of the links between state actors and non-state actors, on the one hand, and social actors’ power positions, political identities, and professional practices, on the other.
Focusing on journalists’ professional behaviors during the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey, this article offers a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of inertia into contentious action. Accordingly, the emotion of shame triggers contention when it is experienced with a contingent event that generates hope for change. In Turkey, journalists working in the mainstream media extensively practiced self-censorship before the 2013 Gezi Protests and felt ashamed of themselves. This feeling became a trigger for joining public protests, resigning and/or producing non-compliant news stories when Gezi offered them an opportunity for social change. This argument builds on the sociology of emotions and events, and is inductively derived from 20 in-depth interviews conducted with journalists. The article presents the social context in which shame arises and the place of this emotion in generating contention. Through this research, the Gezi Protests assert their continuing relevance for understanding the relationship between repression and contention, especially in countries hit by the current wave of authoritarianism.
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