A Tale Of Two Allies: Changing Media Coverage Of The U.S.-Turkish Relationship

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3422555

The United States and Turkey entered the twenty-first century as close allies, and the American media’s characterization of Turkey and the U.S.-Turkish relationship reflected as much. By the early 2020s, U.S. expectations of Turkey had declined as a result of both discrete disputes and structural forces that eroded the foundations of the alliance. The American media, accordingly, came to expect a disparity between the two countries’ foreign policy priorities. This study examines two newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and two magazines, The New Yorker and The National Interest. Focusing on news coverage of U.S.-Turkish discord and reconciliation around the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the study employs critical discourse analysis to trace changes in media narratives about Turkish policies and the status of U.S.-Turkish relations. The key finding is that unfavorable narratives are persistent: whether the relationship starts out strong or rocky, when a disagreement between Ankara and Washington emerges, the tenor of the news conversation turns negative and this change in the coverage does not quickly fade. The pattern is asymmetric, too: bilateral reconciliation does not elicit positive coverage to the same degree. The effects on U.S. media narratives vary based on the overall status of the bilateral relationship at the time, but bad news lingers on regardless of the context.