Abstract:

This study aims to identify and analyze the prevailing strategies in which the mainstream press represents the poor and poverty in Turkey. To do this, we utilize specific software to gather the news stories concerning the poor from four nation-wide, popular dailies with the highest circulation, and employ textual analysis to the stories in order to investigate the portrayals of the poor. Four categories of representations prevail: 1) Phobic, 2) pathetic, 3) pseudo-objective representations, 4) and symbolic annihilation. The phobic representations, covering stories about so-called street children, glue sniffers, pickpockets and suburban actors, criminalize the poor people as an object of fear and a source of crime. The pathetic representations decontextualize and dramatize the tragic patterns of the story in such a way as to sentimentalize the news discourse. The pseudo- objective representations reduce poverty into statistical data, circulated by official sources. The symbolic annihilation refers the ways media ignore or erase the poor.

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