Editorial cartoons in Turkey on the WWII: Cases of Yeni Sabah and Cumhuriyet

This study is about the Turkish press during the period of the Second World War (1939-1945). In the study, the conflict showing up in the Turkish press depending on the war were analyzed comparatively through the editorial cartoons published in two of the newspapers which had the highest circulation rate at that time, Yeni Sabah and Cumhuriyet. The study was prepared for three goals: (1) assessing the publication policy of Yeni Sabah, (2) discussing relation between the publication policy of Cumhuriyet and the positive neutrality policy of Turkish government in detail and (3) while doing these, looking at Turkish press of those times from a different aspect by using the editorial cartoons. The basic assumption that this study is based on is that the editorial cartoons are created in accordance with the editorials determining outlines of the publication policies of the newspapers. Thus, firstly the publication policies were detected by viewing the editorials, then it was tried to prove that the editorial cartoons were used as rhetorical tools representing these publication policies. In this context, the study demonstrated that Yeni Sabah had a pro-Allies publication policy whereas Cumhuriyet had a pro-government one via the editorial cartoons.