A summary offence so wierd: Crime reporting in the Early Republic

News as an open or closed text has been a recurrent topic in communication studies. News as a factual text and written under professional requirements constitutes a closed structure. However, once the news is in circulation, the relationship established between the news and the informed person forces the news to new and unexpected interpretations. The relationship of the news text with texts of other genres is the primary question of this thesis. In this respect, news is read as a narrative and the location of news among other narratives is inquired. The crime news circulated before and after the 1931 Press Act is the subject matter of this study which aims to read the news within their textual structure as well as in its intertextual dimension. The crime news supplied the resources required for the city folk of Istanbul who was in dire need of adapting to monumental changes of daily life in the early 1930s. The crime news acted as a host for the negotiations held between the formal ideology and the popular culture. It is through these negotiations that we can decide whether people had shown consent to novel conditions or not. The "production" of consent does not mean much as long as there is someone around to show consent. Thus reading news as narrative may grant us a sense of these people making up their minds during troubled times.