Abstract
When grassroots protesters flocked to Gezi Park, the bias and moral bankruptcy of Turkey’s mainstream media was blatantly exposed. The public started to turn to a new type of media outlet for their news, while big media broadcast cooking shows and animal documentaries, writes journalist and commentator
When reporter Ayça Söylemez witnessed a group of heavily armed riot police beating a protester outside the headquarters of Bianet, an alternative news outlet where she has worked for the past two years, she did her best to report the event, just as any decent reporter would have done. Bianet published her article, while mainstream news outlets broadcast cookery programmes and the Turkish edition of CNN showed a (now infamous) documentary about the habits of penguins. The penguin documentary quickly became a symbol of just how dramatically the mainstream media was ignoring the real stories.
Söylemez and I shared a deep sense of shock: Bianet’s office just happens to be between my own apartment and Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Çukurcuma, also home to dozens of antique shops, giving the neighbourhood a silent, peaceful quality. Until the governor of Istanbul banned May Day celebrations in Taksim earlier this year, the street had almost never seen any political activity.
Had Söylemez worked for a big news organisation, her report would probably have never see the light of day. But thanks to new web and print publications springing up in the country, offering alternatives to the mainstream press, her journalism found an important audience.
I met her one morning in September at the offices of Bianet (an acronym for “Bağımsız İletişim Ağı” or “the Independent News Network”), where she works alongside a ten-strong team of reporters and editors. The Bianet project started in 1997, when representatives of small local papers and television stations convened in Ankara to discuss whether they could have a grassroots approach to the business of covering news without the intervention of large companies with elaborate connections to the state. After Bianet’s website was launched in 2000, columnists from the mainstream newspapers angrily denounced it. They portrayed Bianet as a sinister force trying to destroy the country’s official narrative. At the time, the leading trio of mainstream papers, Hürriyet, Milliyet and Sabah carefully managed the political conversation. The voices of human rights advocates, Kurds, socialists and conservatives were expertly suppressed or pushed to the margins of public discourse.
Today, 13 years after they launched the website and two months after Turkish media’s problematic coverage of political protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, Turkish people are increasingly relying on networks like Bianet and reporters like Söylemez. “Sell bagels instead, at least you’ll be leading an honourable life!” was one of the most popular slogans among Gezi Park protesters – a refrain addressed not only to riot police but also to media workers employed by mainstream publications.
“Mainstream media executives are not independent from the government, they are competing against each other in order to get government contracts,” Söylemez said. “During the Gezi events seven newspapers had the exact same headline — this clearly showed how streamlined the views of the mainstream press had become.” As a former employee of numerous mainstream newspapers, Söylemez finds the Bianet experience liberating. Since the Gezi protests, said Söylemez, “our readership has increased seven to eightfold.”
Bianet may arguably be one of the best examples of independent, non-profit news outlets in Turkey, but it is certainly not the only one. There are other websites, such as Gerçek Gündem and T24.com.tr, and radio stations like Açık Radyo. They are managed by small editorial teams on modest salaries, and focus on the critical voices that no longer find a place in the mainstream media. “Some of those alternative publications can be identified as ‘dissident’ or ‘leftist’ or as representative of the views of the main opposition party,” Söylemez said. “What makes Bianet different is its concentration on news production and its independent business model.”
Another reporter, Nihan Bora, is among those who migrated to alternative media after spending years working at mainstream publications, including the prestigious Milliyet. Bora currently works for Zete.com, the brainchild of Nurcan Akad, one of Turkey’s most influential editors. “Akad knows how to think outside the box”, Bora said. She keeps her eye on the trends in digital publishing, “adapting them to a Turkish environment”. The result is a news outlet that avoids the sensationalism of the mainstream press. “You will never see headlines that include phrases like BREAKING! or SHOCKING NEWS! on Zete,” Bora said. “We don’t use those cliches; we are strongly against the exaggerations of conventional publications. Our style is plain and devoid of those rhetorical ornaments.”
In September, I put Bora’s claim to the test. I looked at their coverage of a police raid in Istanbul’s Gülsuyu neighbourhood that followed civil unrest over the activities of drugs gangs in the area. Hürriyet’s website ran the following headline: “This is not Mexico, this is Istanbul,” revealing the news outlet as definitely sensationalist – and more than a little Mexico-phobic. “Massive operation in Istanbul!” roared the headline on the Sabah homepage: it contained little information and plenty of speculation. Zete’s headline was simpler and more informative: “Attack on group who protested against drug cartels in their neighborhood leaves one dead.”
“If the Gezi Park demonstrations proved anything, it is how badly served the Turkish public is by a partisan and corrupted media”
Bora admits she overlooked the importance of alternative media when she started out in the industry. “I thought I could best learn about journalism if I worked in a mainstream publication”, she said. “But I had the chance to observe how both worlds worked. Then I made my decision.”
ABOVE: Toy penguins in front of a damaged news van, part of a protest against the mainstream media’s failure to cover the Gezi Park protests in May and June 2013. Instead of reporting on the thousands-strong protest, the main TV channels broadcast cookery programmes and a documentary on penguins
Credit: iz üstün/Demotix/Demotix/Press Association Images
Bora’s moment of realisation came during protests in Gezi Park. “It became perfectly clear that we didn’t need the mainstream any more,” she said. “Those interested in news got it from social media. Citizen journalism thrived. Readers convened around alternative publications that had no choice but to give an accurate view of the events. Otherwise they would lose their readers to other websites or to social media.”
Around the time I was interviewing editors and reporters working for alternative publications, a group of prestigious journalists (all of them former employees of the mainstream press) announced that they had set up an “independent journalism platform” called P24. Headed by the famous Turkish journalist Hasan Cemal, who lost his column in Milliyet this year after the proprietor of the newspaper tried, unsuccessfully, to censor his articles, and then fired him, the platform seeks to improve professional standards in the media and educate reporters and editors about ethics.
When I asked Andrew Finkel, long-time Turkey correspondent for the New York Times and P24 co-founder, whether those independent new publications could be the future of the Turkish press, he sounded optimistic. “If the Gezi Park demonstrations earlier this year proved anything, it is how badly served the Turkish public is by a partisan and corrupted media”, he said. “The refusal of major press organisations to report the events literally on their doorsteps gave pause for thought. People saw how badly their concerns were covered and began to realise that a whole variety of issues (from Kurdish identity politics to environmental issues) were also being spun or glossed over. With the moral bankruptcy of the established media (very much the result of proprietors pursing non-press interests), independently minded media acquired a new status.”
Finkel then reminded me of the case of T24.com.tr, which saw its readership (measured in hits) rise from around 30,000 to 50,000 hits per day after Hasan Cemal was fired from Milliyet. Cemal, who is 69, immediately travelled with retreating PKK militants across the Iraqi border, an account of which was serialized on T24.com.tr. The site’s readership shot up to 400,000 hits per day in the midst of the Gezi events and has stabilized at between 100,000 and 110,000 visitors.
“Even before Gezi, a group of disaffected journalists in Turkey, of which I count myself one, decided to form P24,” Finkel said. “We try to marshal resources to support journalistic independence in Turkey. The theory is you can bend the truth only so far until something snaps.”
It seems as if a great number of ethical values have recently been devalued in the country’s media. With any luck, alternative media will help to correct this, restoring some of the standards that have in recent years been lost.