Discourse on Turkey in the British press during the united kingdom EU referendum campaign

The United Kingdom EU Referendum - known as the Brexit referendum - was an election potent enough to create long lasting and global effects on the EU's and the world's future. During the course of this referendum's campaign, to make voters cast their vote for the desired option and to change voters' attitude towards the UK's EU membership, Leave and Remain campaigners propagated their ideas and ran their campaign by creating various arguments. While the most important campaign arguments created were about immigration, the economy and security, Turkey was observed to be in the focus of the campaign related with all the arguments that are mentioned above. In the successive days of the referendum campaign, Turkey was put in the center of the referendum discussions and turned out to be a campaign tool to convince voters. The aim of this study is to find out why Turkey was chosen as a propaganda tool and to see how often and in what context it was mentioned during the Brexit referendum campaign. To realize this aim, British national newspapers with a circulation in excess of one hundred thousand were studied by the content analysis method. In this way, it was hoped to discover why Turkey was used as a propaganda tool and what issues it corresponded to during the campaign. During the course of this study, 254 news items were obtained from 25 newspapers. Through analysis of these news items, 16 codes have been identified that describe the discourse on Turkey, categorised under 6 main themes. The Brexit-related rhetoric in the news and interpretations in the newspapers about Turkey have been discussed and interpreted in the context of Postcolonialism. In the light of the findings of this study, it was concluded that the image of Turkey was redefined, set in the heart of the campaing and used to scare voters by means of lies and distortions. In this context Turkey was re-produced in discourse and thereby abused as a campaign tool during this referendum period.