Case 6: Turkey—Live Coverage of Protests Pre-empted by Penguins

Abstract

At 10:00 pm on May 27, 2013, a crowd gathered in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park to protest plans for urban development and the removal of five trees. The next day, around 9:00 am, approximately 70 people gathered in Taksim Square—one of the main squares in the city—to protest the removal of the trees and to guard the site. Around 1:45 pm, police using tear gas and water cannons tried to break up the protest. Two days later, after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the authorities would not back down, thousands of people began to walk into Gezi Park. Again, there was a crackdown by police. The mainstream media kept silent; instead of covering the demonstrations and police reaction, TV stations broadcast cooking programs and wildlife documentaries showing penguins parading across the ice of Antarctica.