REVIEW: The ‘woman in red’, media democracy and reviving public trust

Abstract

When the so-called ‘woman in red’ became a reluctant icon of a people’s revolt in Turkey in June, the state violence quickly targeted the news media. Ceyola Sungur, an academic at Istanbul’s Technical University, was projected into instant global fame because of media images of her being blasted at point blank-range with pepper spray by security police. Dressed in a red summer dress, the unarmed and defenceless woman’s defiance in the face of state assaults on protesters demonstrating over plans to remove the city’s central Gezi Park adjoining Taksim Square to make way for mega property development, became an iconic symbol of resistance.