The role of a critical media is a crucial element of deliberate democracy as a potential promoter of the Habermasian communicative action or tool of communicative violence. It is also important to empirically show the extent of criticism considering its lack thereof in both established and transitory democracies. In order to demonstrate the change in the level of criticism in the Turkish media with seven newspapers and possible factors that could explain it, we employ the content analysis method previously employed by Benson (2011) for the fourteen year period from 2000 to 2013 (covering the premath of Pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party its consolidation of power and Gezi Protests). We investigate the entire battery of political news reporting on a random sample of issues regarding their kind and target of criticism and show the impact government subsidies, readership, advertisement revenues and imprisoned journalists on this.
