State-Media Relationship in Turkey: Antisemitic Representation of the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict

Media organs give meanings for the events happening around us. Although many people mostly hear from social media platforms in modern world, newspapers as an important component of conventional media have still influence over their audiences. Using highly influential power of newspapers, political elites most of the time do not hesitate to manipulate the contents of the newspapers. This is so because they have opportunities to give strong messages about domestic and international events in order to consolidate their supporters. In this regard, Turkey as a case is not an exception; rather it perfectly fits to have a specific condition as the following: media bosses and political elites go hand in hand to assign different meanings for a set of social, political and economic events. Based on this statement, this research seeks to understand how the pro-government newspapers did represent and frame the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict in Turkish media by looking whether their contents have entailed escalatory or de-escalatory conflict framing. In this study, equally important is the discussion about how Antisemitic ideas have been disseminated and diffused through media channel within the social and political realms of Turkey by virtue of the extant literature on hate and free speech, media manipulation and media monitoring.