REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN TELEVISION NEWS: AN ANALYSIS ON "OZGECAN ASLAN MURDER"

Abstract

This paper investigates how the representations of violence against women in Turkish television news sustain and reproduce the dominant misogynist discourse. A three-month-long study (January 1 to March 31, 2015) was conducted on the coverage of the violence against women in the prime-time news bulletins of three Turkish television channels with different broadcasting policies (Kanal D, Kanal 7, and TRT1). Employing critical discourse analysis, the study focused upon the ways in which violence against women is constructed in news headlines and main stories and examines the vocabulary choice, word order, tropes, metaphors, idioms, and intonations, etc. therein. Moreover, images in the news as a rhetorical device are examined with particular attention to how the messages conveyed by the news texts and those conveyed by visual representations reinforce each other. Research findings reveal that these television channels have similar exclusionary forms of representation and discourse. It is also found that news stories dramatize violent events and foreground their sensational dimensions, turning them into criminal cases, often victimizing the women in question, or accusing them by producing some justification for the violence. The news coverage makes the state's responsibility invisible, silences women's voices, and let men speak in place of them. Furthermore, it tends to normalize this form of violence by making reference to similar events in other parts of the world. Consequently, the television news does not contribute to the solution of this social problem; on the contrary, it serves to perpetuate the dominant perceptions. Keywords: Violence Against Women, Television News, Representation