International journalism: political crises and their impact on foreign correspondents: the case of the failed coup attempt in July 2016 in Turkey and its impact on European correspondents who live and work in Instanbul

This doctoral dissertation investigates the impact of political turmoil on foreign correspondence. More specifically, it adopts as a case study the impact of the failed coup attempt of July 2016 in Turkey on the European correspondents who have worked and lived in Istanbul before and after the coup. After a detailed discussion about the essence of foreign correspondence, the contemporary Turkish societal and media landscape, we set the basis of our theoretical background. The convergence of the Role Theory, the Tipping Point concept, the Resilience Theory in psychology and the Spiral of Silence allowed us to conceptualize the ‘Syndrome of the Correspondent’ as a framework overarching our research questions. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 40 EU correspondents in Turkey, we developed the themes which provided answers to our research questions. The application of Actor Network Theory on the themes allowed us to construct the three crucial networks of the correspondents: before, during and after the coup. This enabled us to comprehend the correspondents’ roles, main actors of their networks in different phases of their work and to reply with evidence that their EU cultural identity and background is perceived as otherness which encumbers greatly their work in times of political turmoil.