Portrayals of climate change and drought in the politically oriented Turkish press: socialist, islamist, and nationalist accounts of extreme weather in 2007 and 2014

Although the basic link between the global climate and local weather conditions is obvious, the extent to which anthropogenic pressures on the climate system produce a particular extreme weather event is a complex and contentious matter. This highlights the framing and sense making processes that are involved in communicating extreme weather events. This study takes the case of the 2007 and 2014 droughts in Turkey to examine the press portrayals of, and connections drawn between, global warming and drought. The analysis focuses on newspapers paralleling political parties and ideologies—socialist, islamist, nationalist—and examine a corpus of articles from 6 dailies (N = 285). Both quantitative and qualitative findings point out considerable differences between 2007 and 2014 in how global warming features in the Turkish media. The study also suggests that political ideology has a significant bearing upon the reporting of drought and its connection to global warming. The paper briefly discusses the three core findings concerning the differences (1) between the reporting context of 2007 and 2014, (2) among the coverage of socialist, islamist, nationalist newspapers, and (3) in making attribution links between drought and global warming in newspapers of different ideological orientation.