Cultural Synergy: #OccupyGezi: resistance and the mass media

Sunday 23 June 2013

#OccupyGezi: resistance and the mass media

Photograph: Uriel Sinai/Getty [theatlantic.com]

Tencere Tava Havası (Sound of Pots and Pans) is a street performance by Kardeş Türküler (Songs of Fraternity), a culturally diverse project based in Istanbul's Boğaziçi University. It is a critical response to Prime Minister Erdoğan's offensive comments on the protests, as the latter included the banging of pots and pans. The video also displays images of the protests, as well as shots of penguins – yes, penguins. These lovely creatures were the subject of a documentary that CNN Turk broadcasted instead of covering the demonstrations. This is characteristic of the mainstream Turkish media's failure to provide coverage of the mass wave of protest in the country; and the reason is related to Turkey's poor record in what concerns freedom of the press, as well as to the political economy of the media. As Kerem Oktem argued in The Guardian:

The answer lies in the ownership structure of the main media companies and government interference with editorial policy. All major media groups in Turkey are now part of larger corporations with diversified interests ranging from banking to the hospitality sector. They depend on government contracts and are therefore under pressure to make amends.

In this respect, it should not come as a surprise that the Turkish Prime Minister has called social media "the worst menace to society". Apparently, however, such statements by authoritarian institutional figures can only be seen as compliments to an ever-growing international and participatory communication ecosystem.