Turkish actor Barış Atay had written on Twitter on May 13: “You will all apologize in tears.” The tweet referred to Yusuf Yerkel, an advisor at the Turkish Prime Minister’s Office, who made headlines in 2014 after being photographed kicking a protester on the ground during demonstrations following a deadly coal mine disaster in Soma. Atay posted the tweet after Yerkel had apologized four years later from the miner.
A worrying number of websites and pages, including a number of Hürriyet news items, are banned by the authorities in Turkey. What’s more, most of these bans were applied without proper investigations being conducted and without any testimonies being taken.
Tomorrow is a special day for Hürriyet, which will celebrate its 70th anniversary.
Reports on last week’s groundbreaking ceremony for the Akkuku nuclear power plant in southern Turkey made headlines in many newspapers, including Hürriyet.
The sale of the Doğan Media Group, which includes Hürriyet and the Hürriyet Daily News, to Demirören Holding, which is owned by Erdoğan Demirören, is a significant development in terms of Turkey’s media and democracy.
What is the privilege of bus firms involved in traffic accidents? Readers used to say they could not make sense of this and asked why the names of bus firms involved in the accidents were hidden in news reports after almost every accident.
Perhaps I should have written this article on the first anniversary of the July 15, 2016 coup attempt. But at that time so many emotional speeches were being delivered and so many sentimental articles were being written that it was difficult to make a cool-headed contribution.
Journalists should always adopt the stance of “first the public interest, then the institution’s interest, then personal interest.” The main function of journalism is to defend the interest of the entire society, the entire public.
The pre-referendum period was particularly informative with regard to the state of journalism in Turkey, with widespread violations of ethical principles and with partisan journalism intertwined with politics.
