Representation of Turkey-Syria relations in Turkey newspapers: The case of Yeni Şafak and Sözcü

Policies of Tukey in Middle East have often changed according to conjuctures and politicians of the period. In relatively controlled and consistent foreign policy that Turkey had carried until Syrian Civil War in 2011, different tendencies and change of strategies have been observed after that period. The close and amicable relations which are established by the Turkish prime minister of the period with Syria president Bashar Hafez al-Assad before the Civil War had begun to break because of rising violence against local community and conflict of Assad's interests with Turkish government. People of power, who wants to suppress various voices or standardize them by canalizing to one direction because they think they damage their power, can act in accordance with their expediences in domestic policy even though the decisions they make would discredit their positions in a globalizing world. Media is one of the most important tools that people of power use, to follow through their aims. The purpose of this study is to analyze critical discourse of the news that are issued on the first pages of these two newspapers which have different ideologies in terms of the political relations between Turkey and Syria. In this study, by using discourse analysis method, between 2012 and 2018, the first page news of "Sözcü" and "Yeni Şafak" newspapers which are containing the Syrian civil war and the relations between Turkey and Syria are analyzed. On the first chapter of the study that consists of three chapters; concept of ideology is discussed conceptually, the effect of ideology on discourse, semiotics and its relation with language and social structure are tried to be explained. On the second chapter, conflicts that had begun as protests and then turned into a civil war, and change of discourse in foreign policy of Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi are explained. On the third and last chapter of the study, in terms of relations between media associations and government, the news that took place in "Yeni Şafak" and "Sözcü" about Syria Civil War are analyzed. As a result, the ideological differences of the newspapers affect the formation process of news texts. These two different newspapers of different ideologies had designed divergent realities while evaluating attitudes of the agencies in the area and the Syrian Civil War, so they had discussed existing situations, events and expressions in parallel with their own ideologies. Keywords: Syrian Civil War, Foreign Policy, Turkey-Syria Relations, News Discourse