The pandemic shock doctrine in an authoritarian context: the economic, bodily, and political precarity of Turkey’s journalists during the pandemic

Abstract

What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists’ experience in Turkey’s mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid, the body emerges as a site on which precarity with multiple dimensions (economic anxiety, illness, and state violence) is inscribed. Under the conditions of what we deem political precarity, most journalists cannot speak truth to power as the pandemic is politically instrumentalized. This retheorizing of precarity dewesternizes the term by connecting it to state-induced forms of violence relying on relations of political recognition and value ascription. We urge journalism and media labor studies to refrain from Eurocentricism and technological determinism that center the standard employment model and the disruptive cultures of technology at the expense of body and politics.