Speech Title: “”Media politics and public opinion in Turkey””

Banu Baybars is a professor of Communication at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey. Her research interests include media studies, media law, the political economy of media, and terrorism. She has a Ph. D. from the University of Knoxville, Tennessee in communication studies. Her doctoral dissertation was historical research comparing the framing of politicians in the media in the United States and Turkey under the times of multiple crises. In this regard, she analyzed governments’ reactions and regulations to such crises through their response of media restrictions during elections to manage the public opinion. Her further studies also continued on the similar topics. Her main goal is to reveal the relationship between governments and their treatment of media during the times of crises, evaluating it within the context of populism, protectionism and data privacy. The formation of public opinion was another area of her study too.

She has extensively worked on the topic of government censorship on the media in different countries and has many books and articles on that. Some of her recent publications appeared in Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea (SSCI) (2022) titled “Repressed media and illiberal politics in Turkey: the persistence of fear,” in International Relations Journal (SSCI) (2018) with a title “Framing the Russian Warplane Crisis: News Discourse in Turkey’s Polarized Media Environment,” and in the International Journal on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics (2016), titled “(Mis)communication Across the Borders: Politics, media and public opinion in Turkey.” Her the most cited academic article globally is written with Dr. Murat Akser titled “Media and Democracy in Turkey: Toward a Model of Neo-Liberal Media Autocracy,” in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (2012).

She is also the author of Freedom’s Razored Edge: Terrorism and Media Controls in the United States and Turkey (2010, Lambert Academic Publishing). She has edited a number of volumes including If it was not for Terrorism: Crisis, Compromise, and Elite Discourse in the Age of ‘War on Terror’ (2011, Cambridge Scholars Publishing), New Challenges, New Opportunities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Reputation Management (2013, Reputation Management Institute of Turkey), Corporate Reputation: In Theory and Practice (2014, Reputation Management Institute of Turkey), New Media Politics: Rethinking Activism and National Security in Cyberspace (2015, Cambridge Scholars Publishing), Framing Violence: Conflicting Images, Identities, and Discourses (2016, Cambridge Scholars Publishing), and Non-state Actors in Conflicts: Conspiracies, Myths, and Practices (2018, Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and Polarization, Populism, and The New Politics: Media and Communication in a Changing World(2019, Cambridge Scholars Publishing). She also published a chapter with Mine Bertan Yılmaz, in the edited book series by Palgrave Studies of Marketing in Emerging Economies in 2022, titled “A Critical Perspective on Greenwashing Under The Roof of Corporate Environmentalism.”

She has been organizing an international conference every year since 2010 titled The International Conference on Conflict, Terrorism and Society (ICCTS). The main aim of the conference is to bring together academics, researchers, experts and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines working on the subject. The conference is multidisciplinary with a specific focus on political, international and communication studies (https://iccts.khas.edu.tr/about/).