Organizing Popular Discourse with and against the Media

Abstract

This article follows a comparative perspective on media narratives and practices pertaining to India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, previously Chief Minister of the Indian State of Gujarat, and Turkey’s former Prime Minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I argue that both have attained a current position of nearly opposition-free leadership by buttressing a “people’s unity” of those who believe in the reliability of particular information. Modi has achieved this by successfully avoiding journalistic and legal investigation into his actions and politics ever since the mass-mediated, anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat 2002, supporting, instead, the people’s confidence in their own capacity to identify the “truth.” Modi, thus, democratically procured his own intangibility. Erdoğan, in contrast, is more vulnerable to democratic opposition, even though he successfully claims to provide his supporters legal and moral guidance against the historically adversarial and nationalist-secular media system and against critical information about himself.

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