Strategic Defamation
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.
Had there been even the slightest mention of the Abant Platform, the international readership of this report would be able to see the character of this movement, which brings together individuals from very different political, ethnic and religious groups. This can be seen in its ability to bring together Hayrettin Karaman and Mehmet Ali Kiliçbay or Ali Bulaç and Mete Tunçay around the same table. Even if Abant was forgotten, the report could have talked about Gülen's attitude toward terrorism disguised as Islam. Were Gülen's words, "I hate Bin Laden," which had made the headlines of the Zaman daily, left out for fear that these might create a positive impression about the movement?
In addition to violating of the principle of objectivity, the report, which mentions the evidence used in a court case against Gülen but leaves out the court's ruling for acquittal, also suffers from the deeply problematic fact that most of its information is either wrong or an outright lie. The report wrongly claims that four Turkish schools in northern Iraq were shut down. It claims textbooks distributed for free are published by a company close to Gülen. It says Iran -- which is one of the few countries where not a single Gülen school has been opened -- has shut down all Gülen schools. It untruthfully suggests that Gülen has been making positive statements about Hakan Fidan, the newly appointed National Intelligence Agency (MİT) undersecretary.
It also untruthfully claims that the Zaman daily is distributed for free and that Sabah is an Islamist newspaper. It says Türkiye Finans has changed its name and become Bank Asya. There many other wrong claims that are completely baseless. I will call my Western journalist friend and tell him not to be suspicious just about the Turkish press, but also about Western researchers. In the meantime, let the think-tank Stratfor -- which was established by George Friedman, who has pointed to Turkey as a future world leader -- figure out what it will do about all these mistakes that were made on its behalf.
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