Abstract:

In this study, Jin News Agency (JİNHA), the first and unique example of women-based reporting in Turkey, is analyzed with a view to the theoretical background on ‘human rights journalism’ in communication studies. The main goal of this study is to reveal how theoretical contributions of women-based journalism and feminist media studies would and should seem in practice as appearing in the example of JİNHA with its key features. In this sense, the study starts with the relationship between human rights and journalism, the main features of human rights journalism and its applications both in the world and in Turkey. Withn the discussion regarding the relationship between news texts and human rights, it will be argued that news is not a medium which directly transmit the reality as it is, but a medium that constructs the reality with reference to and in the limits of the dominant social discourse patterns. Thus, it will be emphasized that, news in itself ontologically has the potential to violate the human rights. Admitting this aspect of the news, human rights reporting’s emergence as a journalism practice and its key features in constructing news in favor of human rights will be mentioned. Subsequently, the forms of construction of women in the mainstream media will be discussed. In effect, the emergence of women-based journalism and the literature on the field will be summarised together with its appearances in the world. Here, the theoretical contributions and discussions on how dominant gender norms are reproduced by news texts, which function against women and women’s rights, will be mentioned and then, this argument will be broadened through examples of sexist news texts. The attempts of women-based journalism to subvert this sexist language for the good of women will be mentioned afterwards. While examining the features of women-based journalism, the contributions and short-comings of feminist media studies literature to the field will be mentioned, again alongside the women-based journalism attempts in the world. Specifically, it will be argued that, within the feminist media studies in Turkey and in the world, women are handled as a white, middle class gender category free from the determinants such as class and ethnicity and thus feminist media studies has ignored diverse womanhoods in effect. As a counterpart of this stance of feminist media studies in Turkey, the lack of literature on the construction of Kurdish women in the media will be pointed out. With regard to this criticism, it will be suggested that JİNHA’s ethnicity-sensitive journalism practice has an innovative and prolific quality in terms of both women-based reporting and feminist media criticism. Finally, the main principles and the content of the news texts produced by JİNHA as a women-based news agency, and its consistencies and fractures with the produced discourses of mainstream media is read with recourse to discourse analysis. In the conclusion part, an evaluation on the possibility of creating fractures in the existing sexist dialect of mainstream media and establishing an alternative news dialect is evaluated.

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