Wise People Commission through national press representations: a peace journalism analysis

Abstract

Inclusivity in peace processes is a norm that aims to engage marginalized actors and issues at different stages of a peace process. Previous studies show that inclusivity can contribute to the building of sustainable peace through creating transparency and accountability, garnering public support, and addressing legitimacy gaps. Through its agenda-setting power and mass communication platform, the media can enhance these functions of inclusivity and support the creation of a democratic debate that involves different segments of society. Based on this, this study analyzes how the national press in Turkey represented the activities and meetings of the Wise People Commission, which was a consultative inclusion mechanism that aimed to build a bridge between the public and negotiation parties in the peace process of Turkey (2009-2015). In order to do this analysis, this study uses a coding scheme based on Johan Galtung‟s peace and war journalism framework; and finds that peace journalism is overall more dominant in the sample of five daily national newspapers. The findings also suggest that rather than a conscious and knowledgeable peace journalism approach that can support the expected benefits of inclusivity, the news in the sample had a truth-based journalism approach that is driven by political party positions of the newspapers. The elite oriented representation of WPC suggests that the press discourse itself was exclusive to high politics, and this can be detrimental to the functions of inclusivity. Thus, the media debate around the Kurdish issue can be expanded in order to contribute to sustainable peace.