Yazılı Basında Linç Saldırılarının Temsili (2009-2019)

Abstract

Lynch is a form of violence in which a group of people punishes the person or group they find guilty in cases where the national, religious and moral values in the society are violated or believed to be violated. The fact that there attacks, which don’t coincide with the rule of law, paradoxiacally are not marked as crimes in the law, thus impunity, paves the way for lyching attacks and causes them to become commonplace. Another factor that feeds the lynching and causes it to become normal in the eyes of the society is the discourses of the political and administrative officials in the media after the attack. The statements of the authorities are mostly the lynching was a trivial, ‘simple case’ or a ‘provocation’. The printed media, on the other hand not only uses a discourse that supports the statements of the official authorities, but also exhibits an attitude that covers the lynching or justifies it for a number of reasons, thus legitimizing it. As a tool of the dominant ideology, the media, with it is function in the reproduction of dominant values and norms represents thoughts or identities that are outside these values as a threat to the society, sometimes targeting them and sometimes legitimizing violence against these groups. In this study, the representation of lynching attacks in the news in Turkey between 2009-2019 was examined in order to question the role of the media in the operation of the lynching process, which includes stages such as the target, reasons and legitimation of the lynching. In this context, Cumhuriyet was chosen to represent the Kemalist-secular press, Hürriyet to represent the mainstream-popular press, and Yeni Şafak to represent the Islamic-conservative press. The news in the selected newspapers were first analyzed with quantitative content analysis, then the news that included four lynching cases determined as case studies were subjected to critical discourse analysis. In critical discourse analysis, Ruth Wodak's discourse-historical approach, which includes discourse strategies that constitute the construction of 'positive us' and 'negative them', was used. This approach also includes the background and context information of the incident in the analysis, revealing the historical background that paved the way for the emergence of the lynching while the discourse analysis of the lynching news was made.