Did the miner not have as much news value as the value they produced?

Workers at Doruk Mining in Eskişehir marched to Ankara and began a hunger strike due to months of unpaid wages, severance rights, and poor working conditions. During the protest, there were harsh police interventions and detentions; meanwhile, some workers fell ill and were hospitalized. While the hunger strike lasted for about a week, the workers continued their demands for the full payment of their dues, job security, and the improvement of working conditions. Finally, an agreement was reached in negotiations with the employer coordinated by the Ministry of Interior, and the protest was ended once it was committed that the workers' rights would be paid within a certain period.

Public visibility is one of the fundamental conditions of a struggle for rights. An invisible demand cannot create public opinion and cannot be discussed; a demand that cannot be discussed is easily ignored. For this reason, the Doruk Mining workers wanted to break this chain by walking for days from Eskişehir to Ankara. Because they wanted to be seen. By trying to reach the ministry in the middle of the capital, they cried out, "We are hungry, we are poor," and started a hunger strike. Because they wanted to be heard. Then came the police intervention and detentions, but most mainstream screens chose not to see, hear, or report them until the ministry made a statement.

In the mainstream media, the miners' protest was either non-existent or consisted only of a "brief public order note." Although the protest lasted for days, many major television channels did not report on the march and the hunger strike; it was only when the workers reached the stage of meeting with the ministry that it was brought to the screen, and even then, it was mostly limited to official statements or framed as a "public order disturbance." When the protest rarely appeared on screen, the focus was not on the miners' legal rights, wage demands, or working conditions, but on the intervention, detention, and tension. In other words, the frame presented to the viewer was a "law and order problem" caused by the miners. It was not about why the worker was marching and what the result was, but the "problem" created by the march. The content was reduced to official statements such as "The Ministry is involved/the process is being managed." A small number of independent/opposition media outlets and digital platforms tried to fill this void.

The media's representation, presentation, and way of covering miners naturally take place within a selection mechanism. Because the same media order can skillfully establish a completely different and selective language when it comes to the mining sector: export targets, billion-dollar potentials, investment opportunities... Indeed, in industry news, mining is presented as a strategic field that will carry Turkey to the 10 billion dollar export threshold (TRT Haber). When the worker inside the mine starts to speak and walk, the image and sound are cut. When the miner, who is the producer of the 10 billion dollar target and value, starts to walk for their unpaid wages and usurped rights, the media system codes the news as low-priority data. Because the worker's demand disrupts capital's glittering narrative.

This framing is not coincidental; it is directly linked to the media's ownership structure and economic-political dependency relationships. For media organizations positioned within large holding structures, discourses of "investment climate," "market confidence," and "stability" are at the center, while the conflicting language of labor is systematically kept on the periphery. The miner's cry is not circulated because it cannot pass through algorithmic and editorial filters. The miners' protest has once again proven to us that media groups in Turkey are programmed to produce content compatible with interaction and capital rather than presenting social dynamics and demands.

In conclusion, the media defined the miner, who produces 10 billion dollars of value underground, not by their protest, but days later after ministry statements. The words used in mainstream media reports shifted the focus from the worker's legitimate demand to "disrupted order and public order." While the mine was functionalized as an investment opportunity in economic bulletins, the miner was categorized only as a "public order problem" in main news bulletins. In this system, the miner's cry was pushed to the bottom of the agenda as content deemed risky for the order. The media order, which refuses to see the heavy labor underground, has thus turned into a public relations apparatus for capital. Despite this, they could not prevent the miners from carrying their struggle, hope, organization, and resistance above ground and creating a broad public opinion. The miners managed to expose exploitation and inequalities by leaking through their lanterns from that fake "glittering system world" of the media. Because in the plain truth of life, the media narrative that polishes billion-dollar export fairy tales is too fake to carry the truth filtered from the miner's sweat.