Factors Influencing Military-Media Relations in Turkey

While headway has been made since 2001 regarding legislation that provides greater civilian control of the military in Turkey, of primary concern in recent years has been the military’s use of “informal mechanisms of power,” a designation often referring to this institution’s potent relations with the national news media. This concern has been offset by the military’s even more recent silence. This article argues that to understand the potency of military-media relations and how, when, and why the military appears in the news, one must also consider the underlying domestic institutional and structural forces that strongly influence this relationship. Institutionalized military education, consumer capitalism, and the military’s institutional command hierarchy, ordered according to weight, establish the opportunities and constraints that frame the current realities in military-media relations.