Abstract
Turkey’s changing foreign policy towards the Europeanisation process and never-stable domestic politics have made the country’s economy, society and media undergo significant crucial developments, especially in the last decade. For such factors, Turkish media and citizens remain essential elements and agencies in negotiating state policies, socio-economic, cultural and citizen problems, challenges, identity and nationhood. The manuscript of Eylem Yanardağoğlu, The Transformation of the Media System in Turkey, gives more profound insights into exploring these subjects. Yanardağoğlu is an associate professor, and head of the New Media department at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. In this book, she sheds light on the media system developments, citizenships, neoliberalism in the early 1980s, minority non-Muslim media, Europeanisation process during the AKP’s early era in the 2000s, and re-constructure of the media system especially following the Gezi Park in 2013 and the coup-attempt in mid-2016, which witnesses the rise of the new media.
Yanardağoğlu’s book is interesting because it results from 15 years of research from a PhD dissertation to a post-doc project conducted in the United Kingdom and Turkey. It is organised into seven chapters, including the Introduction and the Conclusion. Methodologically, Yanardağoğlu notes that ‘this book is based on qualitative research that adopts a case study approach and utilises various research techniques’ (p. 16). The back is based on interviews conducted as early as 2004 through Yanardağoğlu’s PhD study, post-doc and following research projects in later years. Formal and informal interviews were conducted, totalling ‘about 50 interviews (including anonymous ones)’ (p. 17). Interviewees were drawn from journalists, editors, intellectuals of minority communities, TV producers and experts from TRT, Radyo ve Televizyon Üst Kurulu (RTUK, Radio and Television Supreme Council) delegation to the European Commission in Ankara, as well as Turkish services of foreign broadcasters like Deutsche Welle’s Turkish service (DW Türkçe) and the BBC World Service.
In chapter 2, ‘Nation, Media and Communicative Space’, Yanardağoğlu provides theoretical understandings about media and citizenship and diversity, minority, alternative and new technologies’ media in Europe. For this book, she focuses on ‘growing ethnic and cultural diversity in societies and the challenges to the ‘communicative space’’ in exploring the Turkish context of the media system (p. 32). She further argues that immigration, regionalisation and polarisation have impacted ‘the old relationship between media and nation, as implicated in the notion of a single common public sphere’ (p. 51). The following chapter, ‘Politics, Media and Citizenship in Modern Turkey’, focuses on the citizenship and media system from the later Ottoman Empire throughout the early eras of the Republic of Turkey, mainly the 1980s–1990s. Given the birth of the press and mass media in the 19th century in Turkey, Yanardağoğlu argues that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire had left traumatic experiences such as conflicts and Turkification policies (targeting the Kurds) when were emphasised in the Law of Public Employment in 1929 by which non-Muslim minority were excluded. She further notes that media coverage and journalists have faced sensitivity in Turkey when discussing the issues of the Kurds in Turkey, Cyprus conflict with Greece, and Armenian history.
Yanardağoğlu moves in chapter 4, ‘Europeanisation Reforms and Early AKP Era’, to analyse how Turkish media systems changed, developed and problematised throughout the Europeanisation different periods in which it was limited in 1999–2002, problematic in 2002–2006, and towards de-Europeanisation in 2007–2011. She then notes that as a result of the introductions of the Europeanisation reforms and diasporic media, Turkey began to include Kurdish content first in the public service and later in the non-Muslim minority’s media and languages like the Jewish newspaper Şalom, and other platforms in Greek and Bosnian. She further notes that the rise of the AKP, especially during the problematic years of the Europeanisation process and reforms, contributed to the elite control of the media or the ‘media capture’. With that and the rising authoritarianism in Turkey, and the increased power of the governing party, AKP, Turkish media, especially those seen as opposition or critical of the government policy, have faced legal pressure. These happened during incidences like Ergenekon in 2008 and Balyoz in 2010. Later, the AKP government sized and sold to pro-AKP business entities like the case of Dogan media and its transfer to Demirioun.
Yanardağoğlu later explores the development of the new media in Turkey in chapter 5, ‘New Media and Politics of Communicative Citizenship’. She notes that new media in Turkey began to rise due to the increased Internet use, especially during the Gezi Park protesters and the years that followed. With that, she also notes that Bianet.org is considered the longest blog, which, since 2002, runs alternative news as opposed to mainstream media. Thus, such events have accelerated the creation of citizen journalists, journalism, and digital media. In her research of citizen media and journalists, Yanardağoğlu finds that ‘The data in both cases indicate that activists did not necessarily belong to an organised political background and had little or no personal history of activism’ but those have ‘a belief in the preservation of freedom of expression in Turkey and the advancement of democratic values’ (p. 144).
In chapter 6, ‘Restructuring of the Media System and New Media Convergence’, Yanardağoğlu looks into the increase of media capture, alternative and digital media, including news portals, blogs, and podcasts. According to Yanardağoğlu, emerging media scenes began to witness the establishment of some platforms like the non-governmental organisation P24, Diken by Harun Simavi, Doğruluk Payı, Medyascope on Periscope by Veteran journalist Ruşen Çakır, a fact-checking Teyit.org founded by a freelance journalist Mehmet Atakan Foça. Moreover, she notes foreign support and collaboration of DW Türkçe, BBC Türkçe, Voice of America (VOA) and France 24 founded the joint YouTube channel. She argues that a new generation of digital media enterprises began to appear at the end of the 2010s, mainly in podcasts like Medyapod and Podfresh, e-newsletters like Aposto and Kapsül, and mobile applications like Gain. She writes, ‘These enterprises constitute the new generation of media in Turkey and make up the third wave of convergence in the media system’ (p. 174). This chapter wonderfully discusses two challenges to the sustainability of new media in Turkey. First, the challenge of the mainstream media, and second, the ‘mainstreaming of the digital, or the digitalisation of the mainstream’ (p. 180).
In The Transformation of the Media System in Turkey, Yanardağoğlu explored how citizenship, media context or communicative space, and Turkish political scenes while investigating the developments of media minority, new, alternative, and digital media. However, such work could have been better it had included sections on statistic analysis on the reach of these media, especially diasporic communities in Turkey such as Syrians who exist in several million, and the pro-government press, particularly alternative and new digital media. Regardless, the work is of interest to those curious about the media development in Turkey, including the politics of media, Turkish new media, minority media, and citizen and alternative journalism. It is exciting to journalists, students of media and journalism studies, foreign journalists, and researchers on Europeanisation in Turkey, AKP politics and media, and communication and citizenship and media in Turkey.
