Turkish Media, the Kurdish Question and the Peace Process, 2009–2015

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the Kurdish question has been a major challenge for Turkey. In the earlier period within modern Turkish history, the Kurds revolted many times, demanding their rights; but each time the state managed to suppress them violently. However, the armed wing of the Kurdish movement, the PKK, has fought against the state since 1984 and this conflict has been of great humanitarian and economic cost, both to Kurds and Turks. In order to end the for our-decade-long conflict, the AKP government began a peace process with the PKK in 2009. That process ended in the middle of 2015, for reasons both internal and external. This thesis examines the representation of the Kurdish question during the period of the peace talks (2009 to 2015) in three Turkish newspapers of differing ideologies. I analyse some specific events, including the peace process itself, which occurred during this six-year period, in order to explore how Kemalist, leftist and Erdoganist newspapers presented the Kurdish question and – as I shall argue –reproduced the dominant discursive practises about the Kurds. My main method is Critical Discourse Analysis. With it, I try to show: the media discourse about the Kurds tended to fluctuate according to the state’s somewhat variable political stance; for the most part, that discourse remained true to what did not change in the state’s discourse, and, thus, that mostly the media discourse was one of terrorism and security. Hence, and despite some intermittent support for the peace process, most of the press failed to practice the persistent advocacy of peace that would be required for that journalism to count as ‘peace journalism’. The thesis faults the press for that and traces the failure to compromising ownership of the media.