The attitude of the conservative media in Turkey towards social movements: Gezi Park instance

Since the modern times, social movements have existed in parallel with social changes that carried out by human communities. Human communities aim to achieve common goals as part of the dissatisfactions towards the established systems or to protect the existing one. While sometimes these movements emerge with a bureaucratic organization model in political perspective, other times they are used to describe the organized structures with illegal purposes. The protests which had started at first as a reaction with an environmentalist approach to the uprooting of some trees in Gezi Park, Taksim, Istanbul in May 27th 2013 and had spread through Turkey in a short span of time, later turned into a movement where some difficulties appeared in point of preventing them. In this regard, the subject of this study is how the approaches were on the subject and the way of they were discussed through the headlines, the number of news and columns of some certain newspapers that partake in the media which is described as appealing to the Conservative wing. The purpose of this study is to determine in what way and to what extent these movements, which kept on going in different ways every day and were constantly on the agend as of Turkey and the world, were discussed through Conservative media and how they presented the events to the society. The study consists of four sections: The first section includes some basic concepts on the subject under the name of conceptual framework. In the second section; conservatism and the formation and development of it are discussed and after that, the fact of conservatism in Turkey is addressed. After that, social movements are defined and several examples of social movements, which have occurred around the world in recent years, are mentioned. In the third section; the place and position of Gezi Park in social events from past to present are pointed out and the Gezi Park events which had taken place in May 27th 2013 are addressed. The news, headlines and columns on the Gezi Park events which are taken from the eight daily newspapers that have been decided as the reference newspapers on the subject are cited as they are without any interpretation. The ideologies of the reference newspapers are tried to be determined from their discourse by content analysis on the Gezi Park news that they reported. And lastly in the fourth section, the subject is generally evaluated through the headlines and the tone of the selected newspapers. The content analysis method is applied in this study. Through the 130 copies of newspapers that are taken in hand, the agenda and politics news and columns are studied and they are cited without going under any changes. In the conclusion and assessment section the events are generally evaluated by the tone and the contents which are used by the newspapers and some suggestions on the subject are offered. Key words: Gezi Park, Conservatism, Media, Social Movement