CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSES ON AND AROUND COUP D’éTAT IN TURKISH NEWSPAPERS

This article seeks to critically analyse the discourse(s) of four Turkish dailies (Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Vakit and Zaman) on two significant political events, the National Security Council meeting on 28th February 1997 and the 2008 indictment case against the ruling Justice and Development Party, with a special focus on the recent 15th July 2016 coup attempt in the discussion. By doing so, the objective will be to understand the coverage of coup d’état by each newspaper. The historical significance of the social problem at stake, and the context of the events, will be delineated at the outset. The data consisting of images of pertinent news articles are digitalised and assembled into a corpus. The news corpus is analysed drawing on a specific Critical Discourse Analysis approach, namely the Discourse-Historical Approach. The findings have shown that the lexical selection and discourse formation of each newspaper is not independent of the agency’s attitude towards the events in question. As a result, the newspapers are found to be too acquiescent to challenge the definition of the problem independent of the powerful groups, particularly within the context of 28 February process. More importantly, the conflict seems to rage not in between two separate ideologies but over different understandings of the same religion, i.e. Islam