March 19, 2012

Strategic defamation

Hizmet Movement (Gulen Movement) Blog's Note: WikiLeaks is publishing internal e-mails of Stratfor, a US-based global security analysis company. Some of these e-mails happened to be related to Turkey and the Gulen movement, and appeared in Turkish media recently. The following column is about a Stratfor researcher's visit to Turkey almost 18 months ago, and is worth revisiting to gain an alternative perspective:

Abdülhamit Bilici

A Western journalist who held the position of Time magazine’s representative in Turkey for a very long time had an interesting observation about our media.

He argued that Turkish newspapers generally distort published speeches. According to this journalist, private television channels, whose numbers were on the rise at the time, were an important opportunity to cure this illness in the Turkish media because it was more difficult for journalists to intervene between the person speaking on television and the audience. A politician, artist or a regular citizen would speak his or her mind and the audience would hear them out verbatim. Unfortunately, our media, whose reputation is highly questionable, cannot exactly be defended in the face of this accusation. But an incident last week demonstrated to me that foreign reporters and investigators don’t exactly have the cleanest slate in terms of their reliability and that they, too, can greatly distort the material at hand when preparing news pieces or reports.