Discursive Practices of Mediatic Violence in the Case of Gezi Park Protests

Although many ideologies today construct themselves with a liberal discourse, instead of universal understanding of human beings, a reality is drawn over the ideological rhetoric of the state and made dominant over the social. The legitimate violent monarch and the “obedient citizen” argument of the modern state is supposedly constituted by libertarian practices this time. The statist language in the mainstream media is also inevitably questioned on this basis. In this context as a social movement, Gezi Park Protests stand out as an example case in which many concepts can be questioned. The purpose of this study is to determine which ideological codes were used to turn the events of Gezi Park Protests into news in Hürriyet Newspaper, and to question how the concepts of “state” and “citizen” are defined through the “representation of violence”. For this purpose, 16 news items about Gezi Park Protests in Hürriyet Newspaper between 31 May-3 June 2013 were analyzed by using Van Dijk’s method of critical discourse analysis. In the end of the study, it became clear that Hürriyet Newspaper legitimized the monopoly of violence by the state and fixed the meaning in the “obedient citizen” retribution by dividing those who participated in the acts into the acceptable and marginal activist duality.