(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
as the analysis of advertorial news as a form of economic and cultural production in terms of
critical political economy and its function to create hegemony, examining the conflictive
condition of liberal press ethics is also significant for this study.
Post-Fordist Process in Turkey, New Structure of Media and Advertorial News
Since the early 20 th century, Turkey has followed a planned development policy based
on state-leading industrialization and state-subsided private sector. In the country where
media is shaped in accordance with these policies, it could be argued that transition to post-
Fordist structure and to the new liberal policies it requires was painful. In the post-World War
II period, Turkey, which tried to attach itself to the Western structures, underwent serious
problems throughout the crisis period in 1970s. On January 24, 1980, economic decisions
which embodied post-fordist traces were taken in the axis of liberal foreign trade policy.
These decisions were applied by National Unity Committee of the coup period and
Motherland Party which was “elected” following the heated coup conditions.
In this framework, it could be assumed that the mentioned change and the structures it
contains in Turkish economy are realized through so-called legal and suppressive-whenneeded
ways, preceding the country’s own market mechanisms. Shaped in the aftermath of
deregulation, and in a sense called as regulation, this process is applied in all social areas
including media. Tabloidization in media content, advertorial news and journalism ethics, etc.
created a structure in Turkey similar to the West from which all these were imitated. Common
media in Turkey implements a cultural production which is distant to the country’s particular
cultural structure and indifferent to poverty-oriented economic problems. It could be argued
that the fundamental reasons behind this are work practices in media and diagonal
monopolized structure emerged with ownership structure of the media which aims at
attaching itself to the global structure.
We can discuss that the ideological function of advertorial news and their effect on
journalism practices bear similarities with the Western examples analyzed above. Reformed
media sector has grown more supportive of ideological production in context of its
complicated relations with the state and its institutions. In an environment where politics and
claiming one’s rights through democratic ways are restricted, widespread publishing of gossip
column content and a common tabloidization in content provides the opportunity for the
masses to feel relieved imagining a life and welfare that is never going to be reached. In the
new period, the middle class masses of the previous phase have become more impoverished
due to unemployment and low wages. Celebrities who gained fame and luxury without having
544