Turkey’s progressive West versus an Eastern “Other”
Denaturalizing Orientalist assumptions within British media coverage of Gezi: A Critical Discourse Analysis
________
Hannah Wallace Bowman University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Communication
Master’s Thesis June 2014 Student Number: 10583475 Supervisor: Magdalena Wojcieszak
Abstract
This in-depth study probes for an ideological process of “Othering” within the structure of online news reporting in Britain. Analysis focuses on news coverage from two London-based media outlets - BBC News online and The Independent online - and their reporting of the Gezi uprisings in Turkey during 2013. Drawing upon Said’s theory of Orientalism and a Critical Geopolitics, the study adheres to the analytic paradigm of Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) and is thus rooted in an ontologically constructivist approach. A close-reading of eight articles revealed the subtle ways in which Turkey is presented as struggling between two possible identities: progressing toward a modern and secular state aligned with the “West”, while trying to refute the backwardness, radicalism and oppressive nature of a barbaric “Eastern” Other. By paying particular attention to the deconstruction of textual binaries and suppression, semiotic choices, word connotation and representational strategies, CDA identified four implicit themes or core assumptions within the media discourse: the establishment of a notional “us” versus “them”, Turkey’s internal struggle as geopolitical inevitability, the “West” as the voice of legitimacy and reason and Erdogan as a representative of Islam. A discursive analysis of these core assumptions highlights the persistent - implicit – linguistic categorizations and ideological beliefs that serve to
reinforce notions of an Other against which a coherent “Western” identity can be defined. It is hoped that the findings will be helpful in understanding the power of the media as an ideological tool that serves to both reflect and reinforce Orientalist thinking and a sense of geopolitical determinism, while building on existing theory to illustrate the role journalists and media outlets play in the production and dissemination of The Other.
Turkey’s progressive West versus an Eastern “Other”
Denaturalizing Orientalist assumptions within British media coverage of Gezi: A Critical Discourse Analysis
From travel writing to foreign policy discourse, Turkey is a state popularly depicted as standing “at the crossroads” of Europe and Asia. This narrative is underpinned by an assumption of Turkey as a pivotal state: a bridge between “civilisations”, negotiating two inherently oppositional “Eastern” and “Western” identities (Bryce, 2013). While a delineation of these two geographical spaces as separate wholes is entirely artificial (Walters, 2002), the so-called East and West “have consistently been subject to
generalizations, stereotypes and assumptions that have resulted in their being referred to in this way” (Shah 2010, p. 393). Even in the country’s capital city of Istanbul, the metropolis is conceptually divided into sections: the Asian side and the European side. This type of categorization and simplification of global space is not arbitrary. Instead, it is a product of discursive practice (O’ Tuthail & Agrew in O’ Tuthail,1996) one which the media plays an important role in maintaining.
When the Gezi uprisings began in Istanbul on May 28th 2013, the world took notice. The protests began as a small-scale demonstration in Taksim Square against the urban development of Gezi Park, one of the city’s last remaining green spaces. The unrest escalated rapidly after police violently dispersed the peaceful sit-in, with an estimated 3.5 million people taking to the streets in uprisings across the country (Bellaigue, 2013). What began as a small, locally organized demonstration subsequently came to be recognized as a national phenomenon. The mainstream press within Turkey faced criticism from the British media for failing to accurately report on what was happening. Meanwhile, social media was heralded as “the voice of pluralism” in the face of oppression and censorship, synonymous with modernity and democracy (Katik, 2013). The protests were represented as a stand by
“Turkey’s 50 percent” - the half of the population in opposition to Prime Minister Erdogan’s religious stance as a Muslim and the ruling AK party (AKP) – against an “encroachment on secularism” (Trenkamp, 2013) and undermining of “Western” values: Gezi was symptomatic of an ongoing “war for Turkey’s soul” (Chaulia, 2013).
The aim of this study is to go below the surface of the British online media coverage of the Gezi protests, to demonstrate how discursive strategies are serving to naturalize Turkey as a place of dichotomy and struggle. As such, this paper views the language used by the media not “as a simple mirror of reality, reflecting what takes place in the social world, but as a constitutive of social reality where there is no social reality
existing outside language” (Aydın-Düzgit 2013, p525). According to the constructivist approach this analysis aligns itself with , reality and identity are (re)constructed through media discourse, meaning journalists play a role in reinforcing Turkey as a state that is consistently negotiating between a liberal and secular “West” on one side and an Islamic, oppressive and backward “East” on the other. The “news” should therefore be critically reconceptualised in such a way that acknowledges how an unnatural compartmentalization of the world into distinct containers - and the Orientalist assumptions that underpin such discourse – can be consolidated through the language proliferated by the media (Shah 2010, p394-5). Furthermore, it must be emphasized that this study is not solely concerned with identifying rhetorical examples of Othering and opposition within the specific media under analysis, but also to show how journalists and editors can influence readers and hearers in a political way (van Dijk 1995, p22), embedding the language of the “news” within in a much larger - but less transparent - structure of power-speak that disguises ideology in naturalized discourse. It is to this broader theoretical framework within which this study grounds itself that we will now turn our attention, briefly outlining Turkey’s typical positioning within an imagined global space, before proceeding to articulate a concrete
hypothesis and narrow down the key concepts of Constructivism, Orientalism, The Other and Critical Geopolitics in more detail.
Theoretical Framework
Central to the conceptual framework around which this paper is structured is an understanding that the “news” is not a rigid or fixed thing (Wodak 2009, p12). Although media institutions “often purport to be neutral” (2009, p12), positioning themselves as reflecting the “real world” disinterestedly, the news should better be understood “a product of social and linguistic context” (2009, p12). Furthermore, those who guard the gates of press coverage are inclined to extract the information consistent with their own “conceptual gaze” and “organizational interests” (Mody 2010, p21). Through the individual semiotic, linguistic and structural choices journalists make, they encourage us to place events and ideas into broader frameworks of interpretation, thereby presenting us with a “very peculiar social construction of reality” (Machin & Mayr, 2012).
Media discourses that have shaped understandings of Turkey have often been characterized by the apparently “ambiguous” nature of Turkish identity. It is either positioned either as “emulating Europe” when it behaves, or “lapsing into traditional geopolitics and ethnic nationalism” (Kuus 2004, p477) when it does not. Currently an associate member of the European Union, Turkey is yet to be formally integrated with the rest of the European community. Since the Economist announced Turkey to be the “Star of Islam” the fall of the Soviet Union, Turkey has often been held up as a model to the rest of the Middle East by those involved in efforts to bring about reform and transformation in the Arab World (Kirisci, 2011), depicted as a modernising and reformative state that is on the way to becoming “European” (Morozov & Rumelili, 2012). Alternatively, however, it is sometimes presented as a sensitive region at risk of derailment by radicalism, terrorism and fundamentalism (Aydin-Duzgit 2013, p532). In a CDA of official EU speeches and field
interviews of EU commissioners, Aydin-Duzgit found that the European Commission was reproducing a “clash of civilizations” discourse in its framing of Turkey’s position in relation to Europe, whereby Islam was defined as a “monolith” whose influence within Turkey could have the ability to disrupt the coherency of the European project overall (Aydin-Duzgit 2013, p532). Over the last couple of decades, British media have been warning that a “Muslim backlash threatens the secular state that Ataturk built” (Hope 1993), pointing to an ongoing “ideological battle between Islam and Secularism” (Rainsford 2007) within Turkey. The more Europe is eulogized as a site of coherent “values”, the more those outside of Europe are “tacitly marked” as lacking those values (Borocz in Kuus 2004, p484).
Drawing upon previous research, this study suggests that the concept of a coherent “Western” identity is discursively produced, constituted over time by a number of
“representations of danger’” (Milliken in Weldes 1999, p15) against which it defines itself. An “East” and “West” dichotomy should therefore be understood as a product of social construction, one in which the media also plays a significant role in shaping. This means that, whoever shapes and proliferates the discourse, also promotes a particular set of understandings and material interests. In an increasingly globalized world – a world where more powerful nations increasingly dominate international news flows - the way we represent the Other is therefore of central concern (Fursich forthcoming).
Hypothesis
A critical analysis of British media coverage pertaining to Gezi is expected to reveal an implicit ideological bias towards a conceptualized “West”, whereby Orientalist discourse naturalizes Turkey as struggling in its progression towards “Western” values, hindered by an opposing “Eastern” identity or Other.
Defining the key concepts
Constructivism. Each of the following definitions is either closely linked or inherent to the paradigm of “constructivism”, which is an analytical approach that examines the material and social context and environment in which an actor resides in a bid to
understand how this context influences the understanding of the interests of the actors in question. It is an “ontological position that asserts social – including media - phenomena and their meanings are continually being accomplished by social actors. It implies that social phenomena and categories are not only produced through social interaction but that they are in a constant state of revision (Bryman 2012, p33). As such, knowledge is viewed as “indeterminate,” (2012, p33) and “reality” is a/the product of construct rather than essential truth. According to a constructivist media effects model, audiences are shaped by “personal experience, interaction with peers, and interpreted selections from mass media” (Neuman et al. 1992 in Scheufele 99, p105) in order to build their own versions of reality. This approach views social order as existing in a state of flux, whereby the relationship between the media and the real world it purports to represent is inherently reflexive.
Orientalism. Said defines Orientalism as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it,
describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1979, p3) “Orientalism” is characterized in (Eurocentric) Western writings that establish binary oppositions whereby the ‘West’ is presented self-referentially and positively, while the ‘East’ becomes its necessary opposition. Thus, orientalist binaries refer to “an irrational, backward, exotic, despotic and lazy ‘East’, while the ‘West’ became the pinnacle of civilization: rational, moral and Christian” (Khalid 2011, p. 17). Said has been successful in marking a “paradigm shift in thinking about the relationship between the West and the
non-West” (Burke & Prochaska 2007, p135), demonstrating how European discourse on the Middle East was “linked to power, trafficked in racist stereotypes and continually reproduced” (2007, p135).
His theory of Orientalism has been instrumental in attempts by many scholars in their bid to “untangle the ways in which Western political, literary and scholarly
representations were fatally inflicted by political power” (2007, p135). While interrelations between the West and the so-called Orient have “changed dramatically” (Samiei 2010, p1145) since Said first published Orientalism in 1978, Samiei argues it would be “naïve to think that the old patterns of human history and destiny which has shaped this dualism have simply been removed” (2010, p1145). Instead, he posits that these patterns have rather been “reconstituted, redeployed, redistributed in a globalized framework and have shaped a new paradigm which can be called ‘neo-Orientalism’ (2010 p1145). More specifically, he realigns the Orient to refer to Islam and the Muslim world. Meanwhile, other scholars have extended the deconstruction of the Oriental binary to apply it to other areas of research: gender studies, for example. Khalid (2011) draws upon Orientalism as a tool of critical analysis to illustrate “how gendered and Orientalized visual representations of the ‘Eastern Other’” (p16) have been deployed to facilitate intervention as part of the War on Terror. Khalid operationalizes CDA to demonstrate how women’s rights discourses have been “co-opted into a broader discourse of gendered orientalism” that marks ‘Other’ women as voiceless victims of a barbaric (male) ‘Other’ enemy.
The Other. The notion of a “Self” and “Other” runs throughout Said’s theory of “Orientalism”. The “Other” is categorized by difference, with a border clearly defined between the One and the Other: the Other is unknown and the diametrical opposite to oneself (Bauman 2013). Weldes (1999) suggests that in contrast to the received view that treats identity and insecurity with another’s identity as something “pre-given or natural, and
as ontologically separate things”, she suggest that the need to Other is born from the need to define the “us”, whereby “identity can only be established in relation to what it is not – to difference” (p. 11). This is consistent with research by Tahir (2013) who found that coverage of the Muslims who protested against a blasphemous cartoon in the Washington Post was influenced by the journalist’s sense of a shared or common ideology in opposition to the threat or negativity of a Muslim Other (2013, p744). Connolly (1991) neatly outlines the understanding of identity and insecurity with an “other” as mutually constructed:
“The maintenance of one identity (or field of identities) involves the conversions of some differences into otherness, into evil or into one of its numerous surrogates. Identity requires difference in order to be; and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own certainty” (in Weldes 1999, p11)
According to this view, understandings of a “self” and other” should also be recognized as constructions of reality that serve to “reflect, enact and reify relations of power” (Weldes 1999, p13).
Critical Geopolitics. Turkey’s position as an imagined bridge between East and West is of great significance to the way in which Turkey is understood socially,
economically and politically. A Critical Geopolitics asks for further interrogation of apparently “natural” delineation of physical space, placing under scrutiny the “given and accepted nature of classical geopolitics” (Güney & Mandaci 2013, p433). Instead, this constructivist approach suggests that “geographical knowledge [is] not an innocent body of knowledge and learning, but an ensemble of technologies of power concerned with the production and management of space” (O’Tuathail, 1996), seeking to move away from the unnatural categorization of global space and those types of essentializing discourses used to make sense of people and places within the Western political imagination. Where
traditional geopolitics cites the existence of a natural or inevitable bridge or pivotal space between “East” and “West”, Critical Geopolitics suggests that these apparent “zones” serve
to depluralize the earth’s surface (to O’Tuathail 2006, p41), “siting worlds within terms of Western forms of knowledge” (2006, p41) and should be viewed as a form of
“epistemological imperialism” (2006, p41).
It was decided that CDA would be the most effective way of drawing these key concepts into an interrogation of the hypothesis. We now proceed to an explanation and justification as to why this methodology serves as the most appropriate for the purposes of this analysis, as well as providing greater detail regarding the media sample itself.
Methodology
This study adopts a critical multidisciplinary approach to CDA that focuses on issues of “othering” and “the discursive processes of its enactment, concealment,
legitimation and reproduction” (Teo 2000, p13) in the domain of British media coverage. CDA is an interpretative and qualitative methodology that draws attention to the notion of discourses existing beyond the level of any particular discursive event (Bryman 2012, p538) and is usually carried out according to a ‘three-dimensional’ framework. Grant (2004) breaks this framework or process down into the following components: a consideration of the social context in which the discursive event is taking place; an
examination of the actual content, structure, and meaning of the text under scrutiny; and an examination of the form of discursive interaction used to communicate meaning and beliefs (in Bryman 2012, p538). The notion of intertextuality that underscores this process
“enables a focus on the social and historical context in which discourse is embedded” (Bryman 2012, p538).
CDA has its roots in Critical Linguistics, a branch of discourse analysis that goes beyond the description of discourse to an explanation of how and why a particular discourse is produced (Fursich, 2009). It is a methodology that involves a prolonged engagement with the chosen text(s) in order “to discern latent meaning, but also implicit
patterns, assumptions and omissions of a text” ( rsich 2009, p240). Fundamental to CDA is an understanding that symbolic and textual relations established by the media are not real relations: they can be used to “lie” (Jewitt & Oyama 2001, p135). Rather than evaluating a set of codes, therefore, this type of analysis involves the description of “resources” in order to identify “meaning potential” (2001, p135). This type of analysis is concerned with denaturalizing linguistic features that help produce and reproduce unequal power relations in society (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997) and is therefore “well suited to answer questions that aim at understanding a prevalent ideology” ( ursich forthcoming, p5). Complementing the inherently constructivist theoretical or conceptual framework that guides this paper, CDA works on an assumption that “power relations are discursive” (Machin & Mayr 2012), whereby language is not a “system” but a “resource” that shapes our societies and our everyday identities. It is hoped that this approach will allow us to “to reveal more precisely how speakers and authors use language and grammatical features to create meaning” (Machin & Mayr, 2012), emphasizing the way in which linguistic choices can have a considerable impact on the way that journalists can shape perceptions – whether or not the journalist is consciously aware of this process or not.
While the application of CDA within Communication Science is still in its infancy, there is a growing body of research that is serving to reveal how the media is reinforcing and reflecting generalizations, stereotypes and assumptions “to provide an artificial sense of knowledge about others” (Rogoff in Campbell 2007, p358). Indeed, this study draws much inspiration from Teo’s Racism in the News (2000) study and his deconstruction of Australian newspaper discourse to effectively reveal how various textual elements - such as quotation patterns and overlexicalisation - subtly exert ideological dominance on recent Asian immigrants to the country. CDA has become increasingly popular for media scholars seeking to overcome the common limitations of traditional quantitative content analysis,
introducing a social or political ethics within scholarly enterprise. It was selected as the appropriate methodology for this study precisely because it “goes well beyond the usual methodological criteria of observational, descriptive and explanatory adequacy” (van Dijk 1995, p19) to interrogate the ideologies implicit within media – and, as such, it is the only methodology that supports an in-depth critical interrogation of the hypothesis. Unlike other quantitative and qualitative approaches, critical discourse analysts are explicit in their sociopolitical stance and their work is “admittedly and ultimately political” (van Dijk 1993, p252). They are interested in affecting change through critical understanding, whilst “their critical targets are the power elites that enact, sustain, legitimate, condone or ignore social inequality and injustice” (1993, p252). In anticipation of criticism that such a methodology is somehow less worthy than other approaches, van Dijk (1995) provides a succinct
response:
“It is not surprising that this view is often seen as “political” (biased) and hence as “unscientific” (“subjective”) by scholars who think that their “objective” uncritical work does not imply a stance and hence a
sociopolitical position. Vis., a conservative one that serves to sustain the status quo. Critical discourse analysis, thus, emphasizes the fact that the scholarly enterprise is part and parcel of social and political life, and that therefore also the theories, methods, issues and data-selection in discourse studies are always political. Unlike other, implicitly political studies of discourse, CDA explicitly formulates its (oppositional) stance.” (p19)
Through an increased engagement with CDA across the field of Communication Science, as a discipline we would perhaps be better placed to deconstruct “sociolinguistic infra-structures” (Teo 2000, p44) that shapes the ways in which the media narrate and define the world around us.
Sample
Acknowledging that a full account of the textual reproduction of the Gezi uprisings is obviously beyond the scope of a paper such as this, a sample taken from two media outlets has been selected for analysis: the online edition of British daily newspaper The
Independent and BBC News online – the most popular news site in Britain. According to the media database LexisNexis, between them they published the most stories pertaining to Gezi over the initial two-week period following the outbreak of the protests.
Both The Independent (30 million monthly unique users) and BBC News online (64 million monthly unique users) are regarded as coming from the centre-left on culture and politics, while tending to take a more pro-market stance on issues related to economics. As such, it can be argued that both operate within – or are closely aligned with - the paradigm of economic liberalism, which values the individual above the collective and traditionally supports a free market. The Independent was formerly a broadsheet newspaper, but launched its online edition in 2008 as a response to a fall in revenue across the print
industry. Introducing art, fashion, gadgets and health sections and placing greater emphasis on visual content - the move presented increased multi-platform commercial opportunities for advertisers. In 2010, The Independent was bought by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, who also owns London’s Evening Standard and in March 2012 was listed by Forbes magazine as being one of the world’s richest Russians. BBC News is officially publically funded, but is now putting greater emphasis on visual content, showbiz and sport, promising advertisers that BBC Advertising's powerful multi-platform advertising and sponsorship opportunities “connects brands to influential, affluent and engaged audiences” (“Welcome to BBC advertising”, 2014).
The Independent and BBC News present themselves as “impartial” (Section 4: Impartiality, 2014), which further positions CDA as the most useful methodology for this analysis. It allows us to engage more closely with the "political economy" of the media (Teo 2000, p40), creating opportunities to interrogate the way liberalism is increasingly used as a synonym for neutrality or objectivity. CDA provides the tools to denaturalize the assumptions that structure the reporting, questioning the paradigm within which the media
outlets operate and asking how and why certain traits or “values” are positioned as desirable and inherently “Western”.
The sample comprises a selection of news reports published in the two weeks following the first demonstration on May 28th 2013. The time period for the sample was selected as the types of essentializing discourses this study is looking to identify are “especially visible during moments of social discord” (Bardahl 2005, p5). The emphasis is built on a contextualization and detailed description of a few media artifacts as opposed to the counting of characteristics of hundreds or thousands of articles (Keith, 2010). As Konstantinidou (2008) recognizes in defense of her semiotic analysis of war photography in Greek newspapers – in qualitative research the choice any case for analysis can "be said to 'suffer' from a degree of 'arbitrariness'” (p149). In line with her approach, however, the texts under scrutiny were selected because they stood out as “archetypal examples” (p149) of newspeak constructed around a binary of Orientalist assumptions.
Analysis
Having introduced the theoretical framework and defined the concepts and context guiding this study, we now move to a full characterization of the media discourse itself to further interrogate the hypothesis. This study is concerned with denaturalizing and interrogating the components of media coverage that shape the “lexical field” ( owler, 1991) to guide audiences to a certain interpretation of what happened as the uprisings in Gezi broke out. A deconstruction of the symbolic map within the articles focuses on those discursive strategies that have the potential to harbour ideological meaning, including: semiotic choices, representational strategies, quotation patterns and word connotation. In line with Teo (2000), a total of eight texts were selected. Through a systematic and
in Table 1), a close reading of the texts unravels the way in which a systematic construction of an Eastern “other” is imbricated within the structure of online media reporting in Britain.
The following core assumptions or themes were identified during the process of close reading: the “West” as the voice of legitimacy and reason, “Us” versus “Them”, Turkey’s internal struggle as geopolitical inevitability and Erdogan as a representative of Islam. It is these themes that structure the discursive but informed analysis of the media discourse that now follows.
TABLE 1: Summary of news reports under analysis
S/N Date Source Summary
1 June 3 2013 BBC News Clashes rage in Istanbul’s Besiktas area as the White House reaffirms that peaceful demonstration are part of democratic expression
2 June 3 2013 BBC News Documenting the first outbreak of the anti-governmental protests from Istanbul
3 June 3 2013 BBC News Hopes are blazing in Istanbul as protesters battle to against autocracy and “creeping Islamisation”
4 June 6 2013 The Independent Looking back over a decade of Erdogan’s policies that have been undermining secularism and encroaching on democracy 5 June 7 2013 The Independent The protests in Turkey are more
significant than Erdogan would suggest
6 June 13 2013 The Independent Turkey’s EU membership is put at risk as Amnesty international
condemns violence of security forces 7 June 13 2013 The Independent Meeting supporters of Erdogan and
the AKP in the Prime Minister’s Istanbul stronghold
8 June 14 2013 BBC News Exploring Turkey’s manufacturing boom, highlighting the country as a place of competing visions and contrast
The “West” as the voice of legitimacy and reason
When investigating for ideological bias within news reporting, it is important to acknowledge quotation patterns as “an important ideological tool to manipulate reader’s perceptions and interpretation of people and events” (Teo 2000, p18). Giving voice to some people over others often enhances “the power and importance of those who are quoted” (2000, p41), endowing particular narratives with validity and undermining others. Within the discourse under analysis, it is typically officials from the United States (US) and Europe who are provided with the opportunity to comment and cast judgment on the events as they unfold in Gezi.
This quote from BBC News demonstrates how the text gives the United States administration the authority to provide a benchmark for democracy:
“Late on Sunday, the White House said in a statement that all parties should ‘calm the situation’, and reaffirmed that peaceful demonstrations were ‘part of democratic expression.’ The US previously criticized the security forces for their initial response to the protest.”
This quote places the US administration above the politics of the situation, implying that the White House is in a legitimate position to criticize and condone the behavior of other governments. The US is the only administration that is provided the opportunity to
comment, serving to validate the US’ assertion of itself as a “global policeman” (Halper & Clarke 2004): a governing body that has both the power and moral superiority to sanction the actions of other states as being appropriate or deviant.
No further context is provided as to why it is the US that has been provided with the space to comment, naturalizing the assumption that it is at the top of an international pecking order, consolidating the US projection of itself as a country that operates in a calm and measured way, and providing it with the role of a promoter of diversity and democratic
expression. Khalid (2011) similarly identified the way in which the US presented itself as enlightened and “civilized” (p16) in her research into the discourse that shaped the War on Terror, serving to justify US military interventions in Afghanistan. One could argue that the example identified here similarly conceals material foreign policy objectives the US administration may have for positioning itself as a liberating force within the region, obscuring how maintaining Turkey as an outpost of secularism and liberalism might be useful for America’s own economic and strategic opportunities.
A separate example from The Independent similarly shows how representatives from the European Union are given to commenting on Turkey’s trajectory to “Europeaness”. Both the French EU affairs minister and the German foreign minister are cited as
authorities that stand on behalf of the European “community” in their condemnation of the way Erdogan has handled Gezi. They warn that the recent unrest and violence could affect Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.
“The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle said the government’s reaction to the crisis was sending the wrong signal. ‘We expect Prime Minister Erdogan to de-escalate the situation, in the spirit of European values, and to seek a
constructive exchange and peaceful dialogue,’ he said in a statement.”
The quote assimilates the minister’s own normative reading of the Gezi into its framing of the minister’s statement, with the term “wrong signal” occluding any doubts that the
European Union should be the body to decide what the “right signal” would be. The French minister meanwhile comments that the Turkish government’s response to the crisis is jeopardizing plans to restart talks on Turkey’s bid to join the single currency:
“’No democracy can be built on the repression of people who try to express themselves in the street,’ Mr Repentin said. ‘The right to protest, to oppose the government, must be respected’.”
The text provides a platform for an imagined “Europe” to present itself as a unified whole: as a place of economic unity, constructive exchange and peaceful dialogue. Gezi becomes an opportunity for representatives of the EU to reestablish the importance of the values of
the Eurozone, a liberal economic model that BBC News and The Independent align
themselves with ideologically. It fails to acknowledge that Turkey has been identified to be gradually losing faith in its accession candidacy (Sokollu, 2014) and thus may not be entirely concerned as to how it is perceived by the EU.
Indeed, as the Western elite cast judgment upon Turkey’s state of progression or backwardness, there is a conspicuous absence of voices from elsewhere in the Middle East or indeed from the wider “Eastern” world. Those who are not amongst the European or American officials are therefore “devoiced and denied access to this news-making process” (Teo 2000, p41), rendering alternative readings of Gezi as invalid or even impossible. This allows the “broadly Orientalist discourse” (Kuus 2004, p472) that underpins the discursive border between “East” and “West” to become further resistant to challenge or change. Thus, consistent with the hypothesis, Turkey is shown either as being judged as “emulating Europe” and the “West” when it behaves, or “lapsing into traditional geopolitics and ethnic nationalism” (Kuus 2004, p477) when it does not.
A notional “Us” versus “Them”
It is revealing to look at the ways in which pronouns like "us", "we" and "they" are used to align audiences alongside or against particular ideas. In establishing the audience as being part of their in-group, journalists are able to “evoke their own ideas as being our ideas and create a collective ‘other’ that is in opposition to these shared ideas” (Machin & Mayr 2012 citing Oktar, 2001; Eriksson and Aronsson, 2005). This quote from The
Independent demonstrates the way in which the journalist argues that, despite assertions by Erdogan and “Turkey’s many friends” abroad that Turkey is democratic, the events in Gezi should be compared to the Arab Spring. This is not stated explicitly, but is elaborated upon using the rhetoric of irony:
“Turkey’s many friends abroad have said more about what the protests, which began in the cosmopolitan quarter of Taksim, were not, rather than what they
were. What they were not, we were told at first, was anything like the Arab Spring. Turkey was quite a different sort of country. It was a democracy; it enjoyed excellent economic growth. It was working its way – albeit slowly – through the reforms needed to join the European Union. It was quite wrong to sense even an echo of frustrated Tunisian fruit salesmen or Cairo's Tahrir Square.”
The “we”, in this instance, necessarily positions the preferred reader as an ally against Erdogan and Turkey’s “many friends abroad”, all of whom are presented as having been conspiring to promote a false version of Turkey as a democratic and reformative country. Not only does this present the journalist’s own arguments as truths that have been
purposefully kept from an established “us”, but it also imagines a geopolitical dichotomy whereby the journalist and preferred reader are part of the same conceptual geographic container. The implication is that, although Turkey may be on a journey toward
enlightenment (as demonstrated by its economic growth fostered by neoliberal policy), the progress “we” have been told it is making towards a European identity is illusory. By depicting himself as a truth-bringer, the journalist asserts that he has successfully fulfilled the role of watchdog. As the reader is being told that the journalist has already done the investigation on its behalf, this subtly prevents a deeper questioning of the assertions made by the text.
The presence of the “Tunisian fruit salesmen” and “Cairo’s Tahrir Square” further introduces a set of assumptions that make geographical place salient to the Gezi uprisings, implying a categorization of the protests as inherently and unavoidably “Middle Eastern” in nature. Where the protests could have been presented as similar to the Occupy movement, drawing attention to the protest as an outcry against social and economic inequality, a comparison with the Arab Spring is made instead. This avoids interrogation of global inequality and power structures that could implicate Europe of “The West” as facing similar issues, placing emphasis on the influence of an Other in shaping this conflict.
Throughout the texts, the establishment of a “we” is slippery and not necessarily implemented explicitly, but also used subtly to conceal vague statements and power assumptions that are built into the established binary oppositions (Fairclough, 2000). A binary critique is central to Said’s theory of Orientalism (Bryce, 2013). By breaking down the binary oppositions implicit to the articles through close analysis, it is possible to
identify the normative weight attributed by the journalists to the two imagined possibilities for a future Turkey, revealing the ideological bias that exists beneath the surface of the news report. This short quote from BBC News describing the protesters at Gezi
demonstrates how, by identifying the binary setup along the dimensions of the Other, the preferred reader and underlying cultural preferences once again becomes visible (Fursich, forthcoming):
“It was [the protest] good-natured, and the two main social types were
educated young women, dressed I would say 90% in Western style, and young men with football scarves and shirts.”
Characteristics of the protesters made salient to the reader are that these people are good-natured, educated, young men and women, dressed in “Western style,” pressing them into a certain ideal that rewards a young, urban, liberal and secular model. The highlighting of a set of values or characteristics that define the protesters necessarily serves to create an opposition or Other. In the binary list outlined in Table 3, all that was considered part of profile of the Gezi protester is listed to the left, under the “us” column. To the right are the binaries opposites that may or may not be explicitly mentioned in the text. Often, this side is the silenced and unquestioned common sense position, as denoted by parentheses. The binaries illustrated are related to earlier scholarly research on representing the Other (see Fiske, 1984; McKee, 2003) whereby the binary of “us” versus “them” is central. As is typical in media representation of Others, this text reveals more about the unspoken
ideological assumptions of the Western “we” than it does about the lived reality of the Other (Fursich, forthcoming).
TABLE 2: The existence of discursive binary distinctions
S/N Source Us Them
1 BBC News young (old)
1 BBC News urban (rural)
1 BBC News middle class (lower class)
2 BBC News (organised) chaotic
2 BBC News camaraderie (dislike)
2 BBC News (familiar) unrecognisable
3 BBC News good natured (bad natured)
3 BBC News educated young women (poorly educated old men)
3 BBC News western style (eastern style)
3 BBC News global, secular (local, religious)
3 BBC News united (divided)
4 The Independent noble (ignoble)
4 The Independent progressive (backward)
4 The Independent modern (out-dated)
4 The Independent liberal (conservative)
5 The Independent young Turks (old Turks) 6 The Independent (non-violent) violent
Van Dijk (2003) refers to the way in which the news aligns us alongside or against people as “ideological squaring”. The discourse under analysis defines the protesters not on the basis of what they do but through representational strategies. The journalists silence certain aspects of identity to “make events and issues appear simplified in order to control their meaning” (Machin & Mayr 2013). This quote from BBC News succinctly
demonstrates how the reader is being encouraged to see the protesters as people more like “us”, while the imagined “we” aligns the readers with the protestors in Gezi, presenting the demonstrators as recognizable and knowable to the preferred reader:
“They were a large majority of people you would expect to find on an engineering course at college, or sitting over a laptop in Starbucks, the young, global, secular urban middle class.”
The tone is colloquial and familiar, assuring the reader that these are people whose motivations and rivalries they can understand, positioning both the protesters and the readers within a common frame of reference: football. He also describes how the young men wear “football scarves and shirts” as, even those from “rival teams” who would usually ”hate each others guts”, put their sporting differences aside to stand “shoulder to shoulder”. The common enemy of the protesters – and therefore the preferred reader - is the “creeping Islamisation” which threatens to undermine Turkey as a secular republic and the values of secularism and liberalism the protesters are shown to embody and with whom the readers are encouraged to identify.
Throughout the texts, unspoken elements provide the reader with an assumed position of the “them”, without these positions being illustrated verbatim with “manifest” statements in the media content (Fursich forthcoming). For example, “We don’t want to become Iran,” BBC News reports one man as saying: a statement that is not elaborated upon or contextualized further. The text assumes that the reader – or the unspoken “we” -
binary, the cultural assumptions of the common sense and dominant position implicit within the text are clear: becoming like Iran would stand in opposition to the liberal secular values of the protesters, whereby “Iran” is essentialized as a place of religious
conservatism. This kind of categorical generalization is “symptomatic of stereotyping or cognitive prejudice” (Van Dijk, 1987 in Teo 2000, p16) which fails to allow for the actual variety within the group in question to be depicted (Machin & Mayr 2012).
Turkey’s internal struggle as Geopolitical inevitability
Within the media discourse under analysis, it is possible to identify textual constructions that serve to reflect and reinforce Turkey as the setting of diametric and geopolitical opposition. “This is a country of contrasts, and there are competing visions for its direction of travel”, of which the Gezi uprisings serve as a “reminder” one BBC News journalist notes. The Independent also comments on the way Turkey has, until now, been doing a fairly good job in managing competing geopolitical influences, with the word “progressive” placing a positive value on secularism, which he aligns with Europe:
“Turkey has traditionally maintained a socio-political balance between the Middle East and Europe with – what has been for the most part – progressive policies and a behavior determined by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s secular founding father.”
This notion of “a country of contrasts” naturalizes a geography of power and material conflict, placing Turkey at the mercy of its physical position. Such a viewpoint rests upon “the construction of Europe/Asia, West/Islam as mutually exclusive and inherently
incompatible identities” (Morozov, 2012, p41).
This quote from The Independent shows how the journalist uses imagery of farming and nature to depict the “battle” for “Turkey’s soul” as an essential and inevitable struggle between its Islamic and Secular “natures”:
“It was always unrealistic to believe that Turkey could remain aloof from the forces buffeting its neighbours to the south, north and east. Turkey may be a democracy – albeit an immature one – but its young fast growing population,
the inadequacies and backwardness of its rural areas have sown seeds of instability similar to those now germinating elsewhere.”
The metaphor of the “sown seeds” is interesting here. Firstly, it suggests that the unrest Turkey is experiencing is at this stage an almost natural process, encouraging the reader to imagine discontent as sprouting from an unease that is symptomatic of a region that has not caught up – for if this is a place of backwardness, then presumably the journalist is
speaking from a place of progression. Consistent with Ratzels theory of the “Organic State” which underlined German geopolitics before World War II (Tuathail, 1996), Turkey
becomes an organism with its own unique set of characteristics, guided not by power and politics but by a natural biological process, at the mercy of those germinating seeds. The fall-out from the Arab Spring extends the metaphor of Turkey at the mercy of natural inevitabilities, the unrest in neighbouring countries generating “destabilising ripples” as if - like a stone thrown into a pond - once the motion has been initiated there is nothing that can be done but allow the ripples to subside, while the journalist concludes by describing how it is the “forces” that have been “unleashed” across the region that are now “blowing the political sands”.
Such use of metaphor and imagery is one way of hiding ideological loadings, as they can “conceal and shape understandings, while at the same time giving the impression that they reveal them” (Machin & Mayr 2013). The journalist avoids articulating exactly what is meant: for example, it is not stated who or what are represented by these forces and in what ways they are shaping the political sands, but the use of semiotics here is
significant. The journalist is tapping into a fear of the unknown, the anonymity of the threat grant it a false omnipotence, reminiscent of the way in which Truman (1947) presented the threat communism during the Cold War, when he described totalitarian regimes as able to “spread and grow” in the “evil soil of poverty and strife”. Without ever
having to say so explicitly, Islam becomes an overwhelming tide, a storm “buffeting” and unsettling the world as we know it, able to spread and flow across borders.
A series of excerpts from BBC News is similarly revealing in the way it positions Turkey as simultaneously both a site of familiarity and as a place grappling with volatile undercurrent that threatens to pull it back and away into the mists of Oriental
unknowability. The journalist describes how, on the day the protests in Gezi, she and her colleagues began the day wearing their “best sandals and sun dresses”, excitedly watching as people poured out into the streets. As the protests escalate, however, the previously touristic environment, one in which the journalist could identity and participate, gives way to an aggressive foreignness:
“As we had lunch at a rooftop bar things started to get serious. We watched in horror as staff pointed out the clouds of tear gas floating our way from Taksim, asking us to move inside the restaurant. Someone told us that the items we had seen being sold on the street earlier – bottles of milk and halves of lemons – were being used to counteract the effects of the gas. Within hours, everything had descended into chaos.”
The suggestion is that the civilized Istanbul enjoyed by tourists, was simply a veneer. Despite a momentary sense of enjoyment and feeling at home as she watched people waving their flags “gleefully in the air”, the sense that the environment is anything like it is back home is quickly rendered illusory. The bottles and milk and halves of lemon become symbolic of the way in which the journalist feels deceived, or at least, naïve – not having realized why people had been selling them – she comes from another world, removed from a frame of reference where things can so quickly descend into “chaos”.
The journalist establishes a fundamental separation between the imagined “we” and the other that exists outside the hotel walls: the hotel serving as an island amongst chaos, from where calls to the British embassy can be made. The text describes “a real sense of camaraderie” between the guests watching TV in the lounge together, evoking images of wartime England and a tapping into nationalistic imagination of a British ability to “keep
calm and carry-on”. Within just a few hours, the city enjoyed earlier in the day has become “unrecognizable”, the unrest “enveloping” the hotel and revealing Turkey to be place of danger and otherness from which the journalist was “forced to get the first plane out.” Erdogan as a representative of Islam
Ostensibly, a generalization of people and/or their characteristics/actions provides journalists with the means to ascribe certain key qualities to the central participants of a story without embroiling the reader in all the tedious details (Teo, 2000). Indeed, categories can be helpful to us in processing the world around us (Hall 1997 in Machin & Mayr 2013). However, “the selection and repetition of a particular generalizing attribute also hints at an underlying ideology that might have motivated the choice in the first place” (Teo 2000, p16). In the media discourse under analysis, Erdogan’s position as a Muslim is often made salient within the lexical field of the text, as are political policies that are presented as synonymous with an “Islamist agenda”, while his supporters are often referred to – both directly and indirectly - as Muslim.
TABLE 3: Generalizations related to Erdogan and his supporters
S/N Source Reference
1 BBC News Trying to impose conservative Islamic values 3 BBC News Creeping Islamisation
4 The Independent Pushing for a more theocratic state 4 The Independent Religious clothing
4 The Independent Head tightly covered and in long, plain clothing 4 The Independent Outdated and oppressive beliefs
4 The Independent There has even been an attempt to make alcohol illegal altogether
5 The Independent Erdogan may have presided over the rise of Islam 6 The Independent Imposing an Islamist agenda
6 The Independent Turkey is quietly forsaking the secular origins of its modern state
7 The Independent Largely conservative Muslim area and stronghold of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP)
7 The Independent Predominantly conservative Muslims are a group from which Mr Erdogan draws the majority of his support
7 The Independent The AKP is imposing an Islamist agenda 8 BBC News Religious and conservative
8 BBC News It is becoming increasingly difficult to find anywhere selling alcohol
Even though Erdogan positions himself as a practicing Muslim - and has drawn upon his religious beliefs to mobilize the electorate - a categorization of Erdogan and the AKP according to a particular social schema is problematic: firstly, it allows their behavior and socio-political standpoint to be applicable to a to a progressively wider group: people of Muslim faith; secondly, it fails to fully interrogate other political and material agendas of power.
With the focus on how the community identified as “secular” responded to Erdogan during the Gezi uprisings, policies that are deemed representative of Erdogan’s religious identity are abstracted and highlighted:
“Turkish TV started to censor images of alcohol. A simple pixelated blur amusingly moves up, and down, and around the screen whenever a character lights a cigarette […] Recently, even a couple kissing on a train were
reprimanded, as passengers were asked to restrain from public displays of affection and to ‘act in accordance with moral rules’.”
This example from The Independent demonstrates how the text highlights certain extreme examples of oppressive policy consistent with a stereotype of Muslims as fundamentalist and conservative. The journalist’s motivations for referencing these policies in particular,
however, are obscured. Arguably, making these policies the most salient to the preferred reader is a way of further aligning the audience with the views of the journalists, at the same time serving to Other those people who may find such policies less offensive. And the implication is that these Others will be members of an imagined Muslim community, from whom any response is denied.
Policies representative of Erdogan’s identity as a neoliberal, meanwhile, are mainly not highlighted. Indeed, if his economic positioning is mentioned, it is done so positively, as articulated in this quote from BBC News:
“Some 400 miles (544km) east of Istanbul, in the heart of Anatolia, a huge industrial park rises from the dusty plains. On the outskirts of the city of Kayseri, it is part of a manufacturing boom in regional Turkish cities, which has spread wealth and opportunity.”
Rising symbolically from a wasteland is a factory that is generating a “newfound prosperity” and bringing Turkey more into line with the “West”. There is no
acknowledgement within the media discourse that the protesters may have been rallying against the neoliberal economic policies behind such initiatives, that have had significant sociological and ecological ramifications through mega-development projects - despite the fact that the uprisings came from an anti-capitalist protest, with people protesting against the construction of a shopping mall (Tanulku, 2013). As the possibility that the protesters could be reacting against Erdogan’s economic policy is suppressed, religious
fundamentalism is made salient to the unrest in Gezi. The implication is that Turkey needs to move away from its Eastern roots in order to fulfill its potential, consistent with
ukyama’s highly influential The End of History and his argument that if a state “plays by the rules of economic liberalism” there is no reason why an underdeveloped country should be disadvantaged simply because it began the growth process later than Europe (1992).
According to Enlightenment thinking, which characterizes BBC News and The Independent discourse, the factors hindering Turkey’s “progress” necessarily become those
backward-thinking people who prevent a country of potential fulfilling its opportunity to become like liberal democracies in the West. The struggle in Gezi therefore becomes a struggle between those who represent the values of economic liberalism and those who do not:
“Yes, a few protesters posed with bottles of beer, in graphic objection to the new tightening restrictions on alcohol sales. Yes, young women were out on the streets too, mostly in Western dress and their heads uncovered. Yes, a focus for protests in Ankara was the Ataturk mausoleum, whose territory Erdogan has proposed shrinking to build a new mosque.”
This is the embodiment of what Chakravartty & Schiller (2010) identify as “neoliberal newspeak”, whereby the “negative pole” of the autocratic state and a conservative public are positioned against the “positive pole” of the free market and the secular, liberal individual (p677).
Conclusion
Drawing upon Orientalist theory and a Critical Geopolitics, this research has
identified a series of conflicting and contradictory imaginary geopolitics relating to Turkey, all of which are based on the idea of Turkey operating as a pivotal state that stands at “the crossroads of ideological divides” (Baskan 2005, p53). An in-depth critical analysis of discourse derived from The Independent online and BBC News online coverage of the Gezi uprising suggests an Oriental binary guided the structure of the reporting. Beneath the immediate surface of the news reports, Turkey is positioned as existing in a state of flux, struggling to reconcile itself between competing and conflicting “Western” and “Eastern” identities: it will either successfully build on its Kemalist heritage, which is presented as the desirable option characteristic of a progressive “Western” state – or it will fall back to its “Eastern” roots.
Rather than being consistently Oriental, therefore, Turkey is represented as operating within a state of flux. The protesters serve as the embodiment of the
“enlightened” values of liberalism, pitted against an oppressive and mainly unspoken “Eastern” Other that threatens to hinder Turkey’s progress. It is often only through the deconstruction of oriental binary oppositions that this mainly Muslim Other becomes manifest, otherwise remaining silent and suppressed within the text as an omnipotent “force” that threatens to “envelop” Turkey. Discursive strategies within the articles serve to reflect and reinforce notions of an imagined “Western” identity, consistently failing to engage with diverse perspectives and undermining the validity of alternative voices. It is crucial to note at this stage, that this study is not a defence of Erdogan, nor a criticism of those who protested during the Gezi uprisings. It is, however, recognition that the notion of “news” as a rigid or fixed thing is highly problematic. By highlighting persistent - implicit – linguistic categorizations and ideological assumptions, CDA draws attention to the ways in which media discourse serves to produce and reproduce difference, in order to reinforce a broader construction of Otherness that goes beyond Gezi.
Acknowledging the significant limitations of engaging with such a discursive and qualitative methodology within the confines of such a short paper, this study therefore calls for further research into the ways in which news journalism – and especially foreign news reporting - can serve as a “problematic ethnocentric force that reinforces hegemonic representations of the non-western Other” (Fursich 2012, p103). The real world “truths” propagated by mainstream media discourse need to be critically reconceptualised as the product of active construction. To simply continue to understand news and media discourse as a fixed or rigid thing allows for a proliferation of types of discourse that present “nature” as determined by geography, shrouding the material interests of a powerful few in a
geopolitical language of essential “truth”. It also allows a stance of political and
economical liberalism to become synonymous for neutrality or objectivity, obscuring the normative assumptions and beliefs inherent to such a stance.
Quantitative assessments of media sectors alone will not be sufficiently equipped to interrogate the complex role the media can and does play in the establishment,
naturalization, and reinforcement of Orientalist binaries and distinctions of Otherness. Instead, critical approaches are needed to challenge the vested interests of power within media discourse, stimulating interrogation of how and what is shaping the media agenda across all areas of media discourse that harbor ideological persuasion (Freedman, 2005). It is hoped that study has gone some small way to denaturalizing the assumptions of ideology that newspeak can conceal and that, in some small way, this study will be helpful in
understanding the power of the media as an ideological tool in the production and dissemination of understandings of “us” and “them”.
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