The Latent Mediatization of Judiciary in Turkey Handan Sena Lezgioğlu Özer

In one of the most important books in the history of Western philosophy, The Republic, Plato illustrates the allegory of the cave. He likens individuals to prisoners who are chained in a cave and unable to turn their heads. They cannot see the real objects behind them but only the cast shadows of the real objects which fall on the cave’s wall in front of them.

In the modern era, Lippmann referred to Plato’s allegory to explain the media’s function in the society. He stated that individuals rely on the shadows which fall on the cave’s wall to understand the world and that shadows are the media content (Lippmann, 1922). Since individuals cannot directly face the most of the incidents about the public, the media content is the shadow of the wall which individuals get information from the outside world. Although most of the time politics are focused on as a part of the ‘outside world’ in the literature, the institution of judiciary is also a significant part of that world because legal cases constitutes an important part of the media content, and the public generally sees judiciary through its shadows on the media.

This study aims to observe the mediatization of the judiciary in Turkey. The author regards the media as a part of the construction of social and cultural reality together with the social and cultural sphere, adopting the social-constructivist approach. In this manner, six popular legal cases in Turkey that have different legal grounds are selected and a multiple case study is conducted by analyzing the legal processes on one hand and news and tweets covering such processes on the other for each case.