Narration of Financial Crisis in Turkish Media

Abstract

Türkiye has been struggling with a serious financial crisis which led to the Turkish currency(TRY) losing about 30% of its value against the US dollar, the rising of inflation, and borrowing costs since the first quarter of 2018. The public understanding of these developments concerning a large number of people who are apart from the terms of economics, comes from a variety of narratives that involve simple cause-effect relationships. These narratives are mostly constructed and circulated by mass media by using various frames. The frames chosen by the media to portray the crisis affect the public’s perception and attitude. In the scope of these problems, this paper aims to reveal and analyze the dominant media narratives about the currency crisis of 2018 in TÜrkiye. For this aim, two opposite-wing newspapers’ websites, Sabah and Sözcü, are chosen and their news about the currency crisis from two different weeks are analyzed. Thematic content analysis and narrative analysis are used to reveal the dominant frames and interpret them. According to the results of the research, both newspapers construct narratives that focus on behaviors that do not bring structural criticism to the neo-liberal global order. However, the focus of the two newspapers as responsible for the crisis and the solution narratives they offer are different from each other.