DRAMATIZATION OF MORALITY AND LEGALITY IN TURKISH MEDIA: THE WORLD OF TV SERIES AND CRIME REALITY SHOWS

Understanding the representations of justice and law in different media texts requires evaluating a web of multidimensional themes and issues, and their intersections, in a relational manner. Media portrayal of the world of law-making, as well as forms of ‘doing the right thing’, vary across media genres. The representations of law are revelatory products of political and popular cultural practices which intersect in unexpected ways. Codes of morality and legality in media are two ‘worlds of evaluation’ (Dromi and Illouz, 2010) where such a complicated intersection can be observed. Due to the ways in which narratives on formal legal criteria of judgements and moral argumentation styles are intertwined, one can clearly derive a series of validity claims (Habermas) in different genres in popular culture. This paper tackles the question of moral reasoning embedded in two genres in an evaluation of the representations of legality as part of moral universe.