Issuu

160 × 230 SPINE: 14.4 FLAPS: 80

“the ‘news’ link up with and support the ‘continuity of survival’ instinct of the Turkish Republic…”

he above two sentences constitute the main arguments up-

In this way, the present study represents, above all, a “mental exercise” on finding, firstly, the best-suited academic concepts and methods within the discourse analysis area -broadly speaking- in order to validate how information (and ideology alike) is produced through newspaper headlines and their first pages and secondly, on deciphering the hidden meanings therein. Monika Bednarek discussed on “emotional talk” and Teun van Dijk stressed that “facts are better represented and memorized if they involve and arouse strong emotions”. On the other part, Vijay Bhatia has written about the specific use of context related to a particular discourse community and Theo van Leeuwen offered interesting views on visual communication.

It seems that the foreign policy followed by AKP towards its periphery has created a state-centered, religiously-shaped, neo-nationalistic approach, whose shocking consequences begin to be unveiled just now.

ISBN 978-618-205-120-7

ΚΕΝΤΡΙΚΗ ΔΙΑΘΕΣΗ Βατάτζη 55, 114 73 Αθήνα | ΤΗΛ.: 210 64 31 108 ocelotos@ocelotos.gr | www.ocelotos.gr

TURKEY AND ITS RECEPTION OF THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR ACCORDING TO TURKISH NEWSPAPERS

on which the present research is based upon. More specifically, this book explores the use of newspapers by the Turkish state apparatus, and its “guardians”, as a means to propagate its (their) dominant ideology. Something that is accomplished via intangible tools such as the concealed meanings found behind newspaper headlines, front pages and news presentation.

These are the concepts applied and used here, in conjunction to other very important ones, so as to establish that within Turkey emotions are constantly stimulated by the Press, and the media in general, and the citizens must abide unconsciously to the tenet that the “State survival” is everyone’s duty. One characteristic feature of this policy involves the extensive use of red (the allusion to the ‘ay yıldız’, the Turkish flag), yellow (a visually ‘aggressive’ color used for warning) and black (used to denote serious events) colors while blue serves as a color for presenting “softer” news with a human-centered dimension. As it is aptly argued a new model of polarization is present within Turkish society. Therefore, the need for stirring up national feelings and demonstrating the need to protect one’s country from the “Other” compels these two policies to cooperate perfectly well corresponding to a ‘unifying element’ arrangement.

Georgios Michalakopoulos

“Space and memory are maps on which these changes leave their traces”

Georgios Michalakopoulos

TURKEY AND ITS RECEPTION OF THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR ACCORDING TO TURKISH NEWSPAPERS (SEPTEMBER 25-OCTOBER 7, 2014) DECODING THE POLITICAL LANGUAGE OF THE NEWSPAPERS: TRANSLATION, CONTENT AND THE MEANINGS CONVEYED

Title Turkey and its Reception of the Syrian Civil War According to Turkish Newspapers (September 25-October 7, 2014) Author Georgios Michalakopoulos Book design Ocelotos Publications Copyright© 2021 Georgios Michalakopoulos First Published Athens, November 2021 ISBN 978-618-205-120-7

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of the author and of Ocelotos Publications.

Vatatzi 55 str., 114 73 Athens ΤEL. : +30210 6431108 E-MAIL: ekdoseis.ocelotos@gmail.com www. ocelotos. gr

Georgios Michalakopoulos

TURKEY AND ITS RECEPTION OF THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR ACCORDING TO TURKISH NEWSPAPERS (SEPTEMBER 25-OCTOBER 7, 2014)

DECODING THE POLITICAL LANGUAGE OF THE NEWSPAPERS: TRANSLATION, CONTENT AND THE MEANINGS CONVEYED

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ��9 PART 1 Setting up the initial concepts and framework �� 17 1.1 Introduction �� 17 1.2 The relation between the concepts of Text Corpus, Discourse, CDA and ‘Genre’ with the present study-A brief description �� 19 1.3 Content Analysis: addressing its main dimensions �� 26 1.4. CDA, Translation and the concept of Power �� 29 1.5. CDA, images and emotions �� 33 1.5.1. CDA and image �� 33 1.5.2. CDA and societal beliefs through newspaper headlines �� 34 1.6 Genre analysis, Social Semiotic analysis and using the Language as a tool �� 36 1.7. The “mediatic field” covered by this study �� 41 1.7.1. Turkish Newspapers, Political Patronage and Raking up Emotions: The case of the Syrian Civil War �� 41 1.7.2. News and front pages �� 45 PART 2 Presenting news to the readers: is there an easy explanation of how is this done? �� 48 2.1 General Description-Method and Tools �� 48 2.1.1 Examination method and the combination of elements �� 48 2.1.2 The “tools” that were used �� 51 2.1.3 Inherent difficulties for conducting examinations of this kind �� 54 2.1.3.1. Emotion, Ideology and Power: The methods proposed by van Dijk and Bednarek �� 55 2.2 Persuasion/manipulation and Evaluation �� 58

—5—

2.3 Thoughts on the media landscape (and) language in Turkey �� 65 2.3.1 Presenting the aspects of “context” and “language” regarding the Turkish newspapers �� 70 2.3.1.1. Turkish language’s cultural and ideological representations �� 70 2.3.1.2. The language of the newspapers as explained by Işıl İnce Özyıldırım �� 73 2.3.1.3. The language of the news-pages in Turkey: Drawing a frame for content analysis �� 79 PART 3 Critical knowledge to be taken into consideration �� 83 3.1 The main political and social events in 2014 that relate to this study �� 83 3.2 The skirmishes on the Turkey-Syria border line, the “war against ISIS” and a very ambiguous information �� 85 3.2.1 Methodological analytical framework �� 85 PART 4 The information “base” and the text corpus �� 88 4.1 Basic background information �� 88 4.2 Translation of the front page news (September 25-October 7, 2014) ��90 PART 5 Keywords and Grammar: Quantity, Quality and Interpretation �� 146 5.1 Analysis and resulting thoughts and ideas �� 146 5.2 Key-words �� 147 5.2.1 Deciphering the “Key-words” �� 150 5.3 Grammatical structures and the method of Işıl İnce Özyıldırım �� 155 1.1. “Non-planned” texts �� 155 1.2. “Planned” texts �� 158 2.1. “Narrative” function of the newspaper texts �� 162 2.2. “Non-narrative” function of the newspaper texts �� 162 3.1. “Explicit reference �� 165 3.2. “Situation-linked reference” �� 168

—6—

4.1 The “open persuasion rhetoric” �� 171 5.1 “Abstract” information and “Specific” information �� 174 Conclusion or Connecting the dots: uniting the discourse and its ensuing meaning with today’s Turkey �� 177 I. On Social Semiotics and the messages conveyed by the Turkish newspapers �� 177 Ι.i Aspects and explanations emerging from the texts at the newspapers’ front pages �� 180 II. What is the nature of the Turkish republic and of Turkish society? �� 182 Bibliography �� 188 Other webpages used �� 196 APPENDIX 1 �� 197 The front pages of the Turkish newspapers presented in this study �� 197 APPENDIX 2 �� 225 Total number of all news and of relevant news published during the examination period �� 225 INDEX �� 238

—7—

PREFACE

“…in all cases so far examined, each meaning can be associated with a distinct formal patterning . . . There is ultimately no distinction between form and meaning . . . (The) meaning affects the structure and this is . . . the principal observation of corpus linguistics in the last decade.” (Sinclair, 1991, 496)

Our world is an inter-national one. In this way, many intellectual and other achievements have been accomplished through cooperation, or better through inter-relation of methods and ideas. And academia has always been on the frontline presenting and testing new methods and new ways of thinking. The present study is above all a mental exercise on deciphering hidden meanings. An attempt to find the best-suited academic concepts to validate a rather complex phenomenon: how information produced in newspaper headlines and their first pages helps defining the dominant ideology that characterizes the Turkish State if this state is identified with a mechanism protecting its own interests. In view of the challenging nature of the relation between the State and its “guardians”, it was considered necessary to combine four methods of analysis whose common point of view focuses on the discourse of public information messages. Therefore, the final result has been produced via the synthesis of specific elements, belonging to the mentioned approaches, that guide to and substantiate the aim of the present study. The idea for this combination has taken its final shape during the period that the author of the present study was giving lectures, on graduate and post-graduate level, concerning the use of political discourse in Turkey. It was then that his reading consisted of the theories and the examples proposed by prominent names of the field such as Teun van Dijk, Norman and Isabella Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Paul Chilton, Monika Bednarek, Christina Schaffner, Kimberley Neuendorf, Klaus Krippendorff, Jay Lemke, Sue Wright, Pierre Bourdieu, Vijay K. Bha—9—

tia, Geoffrey Leech, Christiane Nord, John M. Swales, Susan Hunston and Theo van Leeuwen. Likewise, invaluable knowledge, ideas, examples and arguments were obtained from the books of Ömer Özer, Çiler Dursun, Ayşe İnal and Işıl İnce Özyıldırım1. This exceptional “brainstorming” triggered the idea of researching the ideological underpins supporting and promoted by the Turkish State by combining the conceptual frameworks that can be found in the theories and methods of all the above-mentioned writers. So, the concepts and ideas that were used for the present examination belong to most of the above writers whereas the explanations regarding the messages transferred by the newspapers belong -almost entirely- to the author of the present study. To this respect, it is hoped that the reader’s judgment for the current effort will be tolerant due to the fact that examinations of this kind represent something innovative in the field of, broadly speaking, discourse analysis of the Turkish media as it is perceived by a Greek scholar. In any case, the present work is something new and had to overcome certain difficulties owed to the limited, almost non-existent, relevant works in Greek academia and to the underdeveloped relevant knowledge within it. The author of the present study is studying Turkey, in terms of its politics, culture and language dynamics, for a long time now. And as his knowledge on the on-goings in that country piled up and his interaction with the students was building up year by year, it became obvious that there exist few academic textbooks that could even “scratch the surface” and present the mechanisms that may, and I repeat it again “may”, decode the behavior of the Turkish people and subsequently of its leaders. Moreover, it is the author’s firm belief that when someone goes near a people’s culture and examines it only then there begin to appear some clues that delineate patterns of behavior and ways of thinking. This belief constitutes the basic reason for the realization of this study along with two factors that played a major role: firstly, the unceasing1 The books are, respectively, Gökyüzüne Çığlık (Cry to the sky) [a book on Critical Analysis], İletişim Kuram Kritik (A critique to Communication Theory), “Haber Medyası, Siyaset ve Terör” and “Haber Medyası Ve Seçim Kampanyaları” (“Media News, Politics and Terrorism”, “Media News and Electoral Campaigns”) and Tür Çözümlemesi-Türkçe Metin İncelemeleri ve Karşılaştırmalar (Genre Analysis-Examination and Comparison of texts in Turkish).

— 10 —

ly aggravated situation between Greece and Turkey wherein the “communicative balance” seems always to be shifted in favor of the latter part. Secondly, the questions that I have received over the years by the students that were willing to follow the lessons I was teaching because these questions presented a similar pattern: more specifically the students’ effort to understand an eastern “Other” through their western “lens”; and I mean their personal point of view that was following a particular type and style of pre-shaped words, notions and a specific way of looking at things concerning Turkey. And worse, these pre-shaped patterns originated mainly from translations of news and opinions that were disseminated by Greek reporters or “experts” that they presented them as their own. And my critical stance towards this practice leads to a second belief: it’s absolutely impossible for a French, English, American, German, Russian or researcher, academic, journalist of any other nationality to understand deeply what happened during the over than 400 years cruel occupation of Greeks from the Ottoman Turks and what this means for the Greek cultural unconscious.2And therefore, it is impossible for any non-Greek researcher to add this kind of… “lens” to their point of view when they have to write or speak about Greek-Turkish relations. Since the establishment of the first human organized communities, be it inside caves or in little settlements, the need for communication between their members has been of primary importance. And little by little the first uttered sounds became written signs that bear specific meaning and little by little languages were created. From then onwards the human intellect was developed and thus civilizations emerged. And during this course, the practice of “power” -any kind of power: political, 2 “The cultural unconscious of any community derives from the set of beliefs that make up its own web” (Meador, 175) and when the cultural unconscious “interacts with both the archetypal and personal realms of the psyche and the broader outer world arena of schools, communities, media, and all the other forms of cultural and group life” then the so-called and important “cultural complexes” emerge. In few words, they constitute a component of the psyche (i.e., the social, economic and political level for an individual or a collective psychological experience) and they contain “the description of groups and classes of people as filtered through the psyches of generations of ancestors.” And “once the cultural complex is activated in an individual or a group, however, the everyday cultural identity can be overtaken by the affect of the cultural complex, often built up over centuries of repetitive traumatic experience.” (Singer and Kimbles, 2004, 3 and 4-5) (emphasis added).

— 11 —

religious, intellectual and even the economic one- was built upon one’s skill to master the language as a means of achieving goals. In this respect, this study’s core aim is based on the principle that not only the basic lexical units (i.e., words) hold a central place within the language function but also that larger lexical units can be of equal, even higher, importance in terms of meaning-carriers. And because of today’s multifaceted human relations, the author of the present study considered imperative to explore a new path for making sense of the complicated manners that communication acts are conducted today. The theoretical method that is followed here, in order to present and analyze the findings related to the newspaper headlines and their accompanying texts, interconnect with the author’s main argument: the “news” link up with and support the “continuity of survival” instinct of the Turkish Republic; in other words, the state apparatus’s skillful functioning and the fulfilment of the vested interests in it. Besides, any thorough analysis of unprocessed texts of similar kind requires also, not only the researcher’s years-long experience in studying the “object” in question but also, a satisfactory understanding of the texts themselves so as for any news features that’s being analyzed to be contextualized. And for this reason, the present research seeks to evaluate and analyze any finding ensued from this research and not merely to report some facts. All communication acts need someone to “produce” and someone to “consume” the message/messages. And in between them one can find the ‘vehicle’ that receives, shapes and transmits the message/messages. In our case, this ternary relationship consists of a charismatic leader, the newspapers and their journalists and, finally, the public that is characterized by sentimental nature. And this leader’s “shadow” weighs heavy over the media functioning. A charismatic leader -whose rise is dictated by the need of a large group in crisis, as Max Weber and others have written-3 succeeds in taking 3 For instance, see Max Weber (1978) Economy and Society, p. 1112; Reinhard Bendix (1960) Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait; J. M. Bruns (1978) Leadership; Luciano Cavalli (1987) Il presidente americano. Bologna: Il Mulino in Zuccarini Monica (2011) The

— 12 —

thousands or even millions out of their political isolation and lead them to a new kind of political participation which can be “adaptive” or “destructive”. Moreover, and possibly more importantly, a charismatic (or “transforming”) leader “reshape(s) the external world and the psychosocial and political identity of their large group”4 and for this to be achieved “the large group must be in a state… (of) ‘regression’”5 (Volkan, 2004, 45-6). And it comes naturally as a logical sequence Michael Hoey’s thought-stimulating argument regarding the participants in an event: “each instance of a word, a structure, a pattern in use” makes them “adjust their expectations in their light of that shred of experience” and thus “they will be more prepared to receive the same kind of textual signal on a future occasion” (Hoey et al., 2007, 1-2). Hoey continues by connecting the frequency of the events with the experience and the expectations of the participants. And these stimulating ideas can be combined, on the one hand, with Wolfgang Teubert’s argument that “Only those contributions count which leave a trace in subsequent texts of this discourse community” (Hoey et al., 2007, 5) and on the other, with Paul Baker’s who writes that “(A)ttitudes and consequently discourses are embedded in language via our cumulative, lifelong exposure to language patterns and choices” (Baker, 2006, 175). Taking these two approaches into account one can uphold that Erdoğan has certainly opened his own particular “discursive way” and left his trace. And thus, the persons producing the news articles they are “adjusted” in presenting a particular point of view6. Consequently, a corpus of texts becomes just a “mirror” of the communicative experiences that the writers of the texts carry upon their shoulders. Two things should always be kept in mind: discourses change because of -and due to- the fact that the bidirectional relation between language Leader’s Party-The Personalization of Italian political parties; Ivana Milosevic and A. Erin Bass (2014) Revisiting Weber's charismatic leadership. 4 Volkan identifies seven characteristics that shape a large-group identity which is subsequently formed only when these characteristics intertwined to each other (Volkan, 2004, 37). 5 Generally speaking, this means, for the large groups, that under stress and when the perception of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fantasy’ are confused, then the large-group members need to feel secured (Volkan, 2004, 13). And a leader is able to fulfill this sentimental need. 6 Hoey uses the word ‘priming’ to describe the “adjustment…(that) is a direct connection between experience and expectation… adjustment is proportionate to the frequency of the events.” (Hoey et al., 2007, 1-2).

— 13 —

and society changes constantly and secondly, that any discourse analysis based on a corpus of texts is linked, undoubtedly, with the researcher’s individual choices, be it on the text assembling or its interpretation. So, the present study tried to search deep into the main role played by any sentence within a text: this role lies in the connection of grammar with discourse whereas, as it is known, words connect grammar with vocabulary (Sinclair, 2004, 24) and in this way, the words that relate to each other acquire meaningful relations. As far as this study’s focus is concerned, it must be noted that it deals with a recurrent phenomenon that characterizes the Turkish Republic: its rhetoric since 1923 revolves around Turkishness, Nationalism, History and Identity with the “Religion” acting as a molding factor concerning the relation between the State and its citizens. This state of affairs gained more pace during the last two decades. And as John Sinclair wrote: “In practice, for language, unlike many other areas of research, only events that recur are worth assessing the significance of;” (Sinclair, 2004, 29)7 In order to highlight the meanings hidden behind the words and to “connect the dots”, the author of this study wants to remind the following sayings that apply to all situations throughout the ages: “you ignore that someone should evaluate a speech not by the one that delivers it but who listens to it” (Plato when criticizing Antisthenes for a long rhetoric speech) and “Say anything you want (because) everything that you say depends on what the listener understands” (Jelalledin Rumi). Leon V. Sigal maintained that the “news is not what happens, but what someone says has happened or will happen” (in Darwish, 2006, 54). In this way, the studying of the results emanating from the research in hand -front pages of selected Turkish newspapers regarding a certain political event- shows that in today’s Turkey the political influence and the patronage on media, and more precisely on the press, is more intense and apparent where the government tries to asphyxiate and control the media. In today’s Turkey (i.e., 2019) that is governed by the AKP party, one can discern the creation of two competing political and social centers fighting for domination. The old Kemalist center, on the one hand, that is weakened but not defeated and on the other hand, a new “hybrid” center that came into front during the last decades and 7 Emphasis added.

— 14 —

which is trying to balance itself between old and new forms of nationalism -secular nationalism and religious nationalism- and which “find(s) in the statist Turkish political culture their authoritarian and anti-pluralistic lowest common denominator” (Rosati, 2015, 259). The author of the present study believes strongly that the resulting arguments and proposals are innovative, thought- and research-stimulating, generalizable and diachronic. Therefore, they can assist everyone interested in understanding firstly, the Turkish state as an apparatus and secondly, how the societal dynamics within Turkey can be influenced by it.

— 15 —

PART 1

Setting up the initial concepts and framework

1.1 Introduction The influence exerted on political discourse by ideology and patronage originating from strong power centers – such as governments, political parties and organizations - has drawn the analysis focus of important scholars in the field of discourse analysis and of Linguistics. The present study’s basis resides on the relationship between language and politics and particularly on how this relationship can be affected by ideological factors, such as personal beliefs and manipulation of people’s opinion. Let’s see what Ayşe İnal, a prominent journalist and academic, thinks of the electoral debates on Turkish TV and also of the overall mediatic picture: “Today, the dominant understanding in Turkey for reporting the electoral debates contains an approach that degrades, sloganizes, polarizes the sides and hinders democratic dialogue for the social, political and economic issues. However, this approach is not seen only at electoral campaigns. The mentioned understanding for reporting constitutes a general problem relating to the communication of politics. This problem can be explained through the traditional understanding of ethics that makes invisible and covers… the established practices for news creating, the values (embodied to the) news…”. (2010, 259) The examination shown in the present work relates to the manner that Turkish newspapers reported on the skirmishes at the Turkish-Syrian borders and on the type of repercussions inscribed in the internal and external policies followed by the Turkish state. The examined period covers the days between September 25 to October 7, 2014, a time span before and after Joe Biden’s accusations against Turkey (i.e., Joe Biden accused Turkey for helping ISIS). — 17 —

The text corpus of our analysis is drawn from the Turkish newspapers’ headlines and front pages during the time-period in question. The top -in terms of circulation numbers- eight newspapers were examined in respect to language use, political orientation and finally, the nature of the images and other visual elements shown in the front pages. The aforementioned examination deals with the use of political language as a ‘vehicle’ for the presentation of war- or conflict-like situations. Following Chilton’s citation that “language is profoundly implicated in all human social activity and cannot easily be isolated as a specific casual factor in violent conflicts” (Chilton, 1998, 2), the present work tried to understand first of all the relation between language and the societal-political framework within which political discourse is unwrapped. And then, by taking into account the role of language as a component of the human mind and of human behavior in the emergence and conduct of conflict (Chilton, 1998, 3), our study analyzed political discourse within a rather particular setting which is how the Turkish society perceived their country’s entanglement in the Middle Eastern imbroglio in general. And this is precisely the reason why language and discourse cannot be isolated from their context, both social and political. The relationship between language and politics is a rather particular one. Politics exists in every aspect of our life and its existence is strongly connected to and interacts with the societal setting of human societies. That particular nature of politics has given birth to a new concept of analysis, for texts and discourses in general: The Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that investigates how language can affect the discourse established between two subjects and what kind of meanings are transmitted through discourse. In addition to this method there were used key-elements from the genre analysis method and the Social Semiotics analysis, as explained in chapter 1.6, in order for particular textual genres and communication goals not only to be examined but also to be understood within the framework of a particular professional activity (journalism).

— 18 —

1.2 The relation between the concepts of Text Corpus, Discourse, CDA and ‘Genre’ with the present study-A brief description

The landscapes of language study are changing before our eyes as a result of the radically extended possibilities afforded by corpus and computational linguistics. And with every new advance it will be ever more likely that the text can and will be trusted. 8 (John Sinclair, 2004, 6)

Large text corpus help researchers to uncover new possibilities for the ‘meaning’ but also to proceed to new fields of examinations (Sinclair and Carter, 2004, 115). When collecting, analyzing and, finally, presenting the results pertaining to a corpus of texts one’s main endeavor is, in essence, to find the relations between language system and language use (Hoey, Mahlber et. al., 2007, 156). And in this way, Corpus Linguistics, or “the study of patterns across large text collections” (Hoey, Mahlber et al., 2007, 155), focuses on texts as its main source for data. And the arrangement of words within these texts obeys at the grammatical and syntactical conventions of the written language. Undoubtedly, the collection of texts serves, on one side, as a means to create a corpus and, on the other, as an indicator of the social aspect that has been chosen for presentation and analysis by this corpus. And these two functions are closely interrelated. In this way, one can say that any result is biased and according to Sinclair (2005, 1) and Hunston (2002, 110) texts should be selected without regard for the language they contain whereas Hoey write that “corpora are not automatically suited for the study of texts in their social context” (Hoey, Mahlber et al., 2007, 196). The theoretical ideas that form the basis of the present examination were also influenced -apart from the academic and other sources already mentioned- by the following statements: “(A)ll of corpus lin8 Emphasis added.

— 19 —

160 × 230 SPINE: 14.4 FLAPS: 80

“the ‘news’ link up with and support the ‘continuity of survival’ instinct of the Turkish Republic…”

he above two sentences constitute the main arguments up-

ISBN 978-618-205-120-7

ΚΕΝΤΡΙΚΗ ΔΙΑΘΕΣΗ Βατάτζη 55, 114 73 Αθήνα | ΤΗΛ.: 210 64 31 108 ocelotos@ocelotos.gr | www.ocelotos.gr

TURKEY AND ITS RECEPTION OF THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR ACCORDING TO TURKISH NEWSPAPERS

Georgios Michalakopoulos

“Space and memory are maps on which these changes leave their traces”

Turkey and its reception of the Syrian Civil War according to turkish newspapers