Regarding the Pain of Miners: Representation of Soma Disaster in Press in Turkey

This article analyzes the discursive representation of 2014 Soma coal mine disaster in the most circulated five national newspapers (Zaman, Posta, Hürriyet, Sözcü, Sabah) in Turkey. As part of the analysis the newspapers were searched for a one-week period after the disaster (14-21 May 2014) and a total of 1169 news were found. The news were first analyzed with content analysis to depict the main topics of the coverage. In the second phase, the news were analyzed for their main discursive strategies. The results indicate that, despite their different political and editorial preferences, the newspapers overlooked the social, economic and political background of disaster by using three main discursive strategies: Generalization, dramatization and personalization. More specifically the press constructed a national mourning story from the pain of miners‟, dramatized the issue with focusing on the tragic stories about miners lives, deaths and heroisms and blamed the particular individuals for the causes of the mine, so that, the press covered the disaster with a class biased perspective.