Populism and media in Turkey: Partners in crime

Abstract

Populism researchers are becoming more interested in the relationship between media and populism. Studying the elective affinity between media logic and populist political logic shed new light on the phenomenon, and launched further research questions in the field. In this chapter, our objective is to provide a theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between populism and media with a specific focus on the Turkish case. We explore how the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi-AKP), as a populist political party in power, used media to pursue its political agenda; and how the contemporary media system in Turkey laid the grounds for populist politics. In this study we identify four aspects of populism-media tandem in Turkey through presenting an analysis of major political, legal, economic, and cultural transformations in Turkey's media-sphere: creation of a pro-government, partisan media bloc; forging a new cultural hegemony; suppressing critical voices in the media; and using fake news and political trolling. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2020. All rights reserved.