Todays Zaman’s Yonca Poyraz Doğan interviewed me after the media ethics workshop in Istanbul
10 April 2011, Sunday / YONCA POYRAZ DOĞAN, İSTANBUL
Following a course on media ethics and a workshop to develop a code of ethics for the Turkish media, an announcement came recently to list all the professional codes of ethics or the canons of journalism, despite the implementation of such codes still remaining a challenge.
Although codes of ethics are not new to Turkish media, this initiative is intended to remind and reinforce.
“Is anybody going to take this into consideration?” Sunday’s Zaman asked Deniz Ergürel, secretary-general of the İstanbul based Media Association, which together with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) offered an online media ethics course for journalists last year. Course graduates attended a workshop in İstanbul in January in order to develop a code of ethics and to take the principles they learned in the course back with them to their respective organizations.
“This depends on many factors. We need inquisitive readers to force media professionals to do this, as well as responsible media bosses and professionals who attach importance to accountability,” Ergürel said, adding that they will continue to work on the issue because it is vital in a country where professional ethics have been disregarded by almost all media organizations on a daily basis.
Ironically, one recent charge in that regard came from Ogün Samast, the hitman in the 2007 murder of journalist Hrant Dink, who was the editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos.
“I am not guilty. The ones who are guilty are [those responsible for] the newspaper headlines that portrayed Hrant Dink as a traitor. I dealt with what was bothering me. Now let the people who prepared those headlines think [about it]. Where are the people who brought me to this point? I did not know about Agos. My head was filled with ignorance then. I learned about Dink from newspaper headlines,” stated Samast in a letter he submitted on April 4 to an İstanbul juvenile court, where he is standing trial for murdering Dink on the street outside the Agos weekly.
Indeed, the story goes back to 2004 when Dink wrote an article about Turkey’s first-ever female fighter pilot, Sabiha Gökçen, the adopted child of the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Dink had said Gökçen was actually an Armenian orphan who survived the events of 1915. This made headlines in the mass daily Hürriyet, whose motto is “Turkey belongs to the Turks.” This was followed by harsh statements from the General Staff against Dink’s article.
Human rights activists, lawyers and some journalists had pointed out on several occasions that there were the gangs within the state, that the media covered up the sins of these gangs, that the judiciary refused to see the crimes of the state and that there was a culture of denial.
In his book, “Hrant Dink’s Murder — Media, Judiciary and State,” in 2009 Kemal Göktaş had revealed the media’s role in the diabolical portrayal of Dink, who was eventually killed as a result of provocations communicated by the media. Göktaş also focused on the ties between Dink murder and the alleged Ergenekon coup plot, which sought to topple the government by creating social unrest within the country.
“The biggest deficiency in the Turkish media is not taking into consideration ethical principles while performing the profession of journalism. We want to change this together with the professionals who are sensitive to the issue,” said Rana Şenol, project director for the Media Association.
The association is planning to deal with the ethical challenges in the media in a more systematic way.
“We are planning to establish a kind of council made up of respectable, reputable people — journalists and probably academics — who come from organizations from a diverse political spectrum. They are going to be a wise council who will issue answers to some difficult questions, mostly from readers,” Ergürel said. “We will try to increase the awareness of readers to ethical problems in the media.”
Meanwhile, a new group, Media Ethics Platform, is emerging out of the course and the workshop.
Barış Soydan from the platform had said that a number of “concerned and independent journalists” felt the need to come together.
“We think that the media is in ethical crisis,” he said. “We would like to raise our voice to keep the issue on the agenda of the journalism profession.”
He added that the media’s ethical problems not only concern journalists but society as a whole because the issue is ultimately about reaching high standards of democracy.
About a dozen platform members are on the stage of preparing content for its Internet site, which will include case studies regarding ethical problems as presented in news stories and ethical dilemmas that journalists face, as well as news and developments on ethical issues in Turkey as well as other parts of the world.
Source: Todays Zaman
Deniz Ergürel 