The first part of the report, in which we, as the Civic Space Research Association, scanned and analyzed the news on the representation of university students and universities in the pro-government media, is now online with the title “Targeting in the News – ‘Enemies of Religion’!” 

For this second series of our University in the News reports, written by journalist Beyza Kural and advised by Prof. Dr. Burak Özçetin, we analyzed 300 news reports on university students in ahaber, Akşam, Yeni Şafak, Takvim, Türkiye, Sabah, Yeni Akit, Milli Gazete in 2022. We prepared reports on the patterns that stand out from these news reports and recur in different sources. Our first report you are reading is about the portrayal of political and oppositional university students as “enemies of the religion”.

In this section, 22 news articles were closely analyzed. And, we see that one of the most used accuse to the opposing students is “enmity against religion”. The justification is sometimes a song’s lyrics, sometimes a performance, sometimes expressions in class. However, the religion exposed to a so-called enmity is always Islam.

Moreover, owing to this accusation, opposing students and academics can labelled as “provocateur” and “impudent”. With this labelling, students and academics who participate in political opposition are criminalized and targeted. In most of the cases, students were prosecuted and prosecution was reported in the pro-government media. The judicial process was emphasized in order to undermine the legitimacy of the students’ actions, but the acquittal was not reported in any of the cases. Therefore, it can be said that the students were only reported in order to target them.