Narin is the excuse, ratings are the prize

Almost a month has passed since the murder of Narin.

Since August 21, we have been living and breathing this brutal murder committed in the village of Tavşantepe in Diyarbakır.

Those sitting at their keyboards on social media have turned into detectives, while those holding the television remote have become forensic experts.

Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen.

There are even those who claim to find hidden messages in the rabbit pattern embroidered on the pink sweater she wore in a photo with her mother.

News channels are broadcasting special coverage almost 24 hours a day.

While we exclude those working solely out of journalistic concern, most are essentially playing detective just to get a step ahead and boost their ratings by a notch.

They are not asking reasonable and logical questions to seek answers; they are carefully mixing up the wheat and the chaff to make the case more mysterious, all to keep our fellow citizens glued to their screens for longer.

While the entire country's attention is focused on this case, even the smallest development carries news value. However, instead of properly explaining what has happened up to that point in three or five sentences during every live broadcast, they act as if it is a divine command to constantly say something new to those in front of the screen, dressing up the same news as 'breaking news,' spinning it around, and presenting it to the people of our country.

When we step back and look, we can see that the investigation has not yet made any significant progress, but who cares!

For example, we still do not know who committed the murder or why.

Isn't that the real issue?

Let's take a breath...

If it weren't for Ferit Demir, it wouldn't even have been revealed whether Narin had fallen victim to a murder. It would have just been recorded as a missing person case.

Let's give credit where it is due. He performed an extremely successful piece of journalism.

He worked tirelessly, ensuring the incident remained on the agenda with nearly 24-hour live broadcasts and social media posts.

They spoke with the uncle and the mother; they pursued every lead the suspect provided; despite reactions and threats, they did not give up, they asked, and they investigated.

As soon as little Narin's lifeless body was found in the hollow of a tree by the stream, the media flocked to Diyarbakır.

Up to this point, everything was as it should have been from a journalistic perspective.

However, things spiraled out of control afterward.

Renowned news channels, prime-time hosts, daytime talk show hosts, and morning program broadcasters, all calculating how much they could boost their ratings through Narin, along with social media users desperate for engagement by 'virtue signaling'—to use the trendy term—completely lost their sense of proportion.

Whatever remained of journalism and public sensitivity vanished, replaced by a murder pornography featuring the village, the villagers, the family, relatives, feudal relations, and even politics in the background.

Once again, let us exclude those journalists who do their jobs properly without falling into extremes, but this is more or less the situation.

No matter how we look at it, it falls apart in our hands.

For instance, on one of the morning tabloid programs, three female presenters dressed like dolls appeared and, while screaming, supposedly reacted to the brutality that took place.

Did the trivialization of the brutal murder of an 8-year-old girl not break anyone's heart?

Or the social media influencers flocking to Narin's grave, starting 'live streams' and chasing after 'followers'...

What kind of heartlessness is this!

And what about retired police officers on screen, acting like 'Sherlock Holmes' wannabes, who, after saying 'We need to visualize the event in our minds,' proceed to script the murder in the finest detail as if they had witnessed it firsthand...

Or our young ladies on prime-time main news programs, bearing highly ambitious and flashy titles, who consider it a skill to bulge their eyes and shout while speaking, trying to inject extra 'love, betrayal, hostility, and revenge' into the event to heighten the drama of the tragedy...

It is not just these.

What should we say about someone claiming to be a businessman announcing a 2 million lira reward for anyone who finds Narin and returns her to her family or reveals her location, or a journalist considered a doyen of the profession demanding that the state put a bounty on the killer's head after the little girl's lifeless body was found!

Let us continue.

The fact that politics is neck-deep in this incident through the family or other means, and that Narin's removal from life is being presented as if it were merely a domestic family matter...

Every member of parliament handed a microphone starting their remarks with, "As a deputy for the region..."

Let us move past the family placing a wedding dress on the coffin of an 8-year-old girl, or the villagers collectively staying silent to protect the killer, but the fact that the signatures on the defendants' statements appear on the screens of state-fed news channels before the ink has even dried...

Commentators pontificating at length after the uncle claimed he deleted his messages because he was texting "sex workers," and screen jesters trying to spin a titillating story out of him cheating on his wife...

All of them, every single one, are parts of this murder pornography.

Let us take a breath again and ask:

We all opposed the publication ban, but what about the confidentiality of the investigation?

Is the leaking of the defendants' testimonies also a strategy to ensure the murder remains unsolved and the real killer is not found?

In short, the tabloidization of Narin's brutal murder somehow blurs the country's extremely painful reality of 'missing and murdered children,' strips it of its seriousness, desensitizes our people, and prevents the formation of a conscious and powerful public opinion.

However, the priority should be to recognize this reality and question the root cause behind it.

Turkey has rapidly become more conservative since 2002, social dynamics have been shaped by identity politics, and the number and influence of those who want to live with a medieval mindset in the 21st century have increased. As the compass of political Islamists pointed toward the Middle East instead of the civilized world, everything that was pathological there was transported to these lands. It did not stop there; it fed and grew the reactionary core within the Anatolian geography.

If you ignore these, everything else is just empty talk. Let us conclude our article by saying that otherwise, we will continue to bury more of our Narins beneath the dark earth.