{"id":37866,"date":"2011-07-19T11:49:25","date_gmt":"2011-07-19T08:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=37866"},"modified":"2014-01-06T14:04:20","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T12:04:20","slug":"zipped-lips-in-turkeys-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2011\/07\/19\/zipped-lips-in-turkeys-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Zipped-Lips in Turkey\u2019s Media"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Associated
Associated Press Turkish TV presenter Banu Guven in 2004.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Ayla Albayrak<\/p>\n

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a visit to Istanbul this weekend, rapped Turkey\u2019s government for suppressing press freedoms. She had in mind the jailing of reporters and closure of internet websites.<\/p>\n

Less talked about is what many Turkish journalists describe as growing self-censorship exercised by media outlets in Turkey and by the business groups that own them. Take the case of Banu Guven, one of Turkey\u2019s best-known television presenters.<\/p>\n

Last week Ms. Guven sent an open letter to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accusing him of promoting a culture of self-censorship in Turkey\u2019s media, after she herself was fired by independent broadcaster NTV. Her letter swept through Turkish social media networks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you do not hold yourself directly responsible about the dark scene for us reporters,\u201d Ms. Guven wrote to Mr. Erdogan on her personal website, \u201cmaybe it would be a good start to assess why this perception prevails and what has gone wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Guven, an opinionated journalist in her early 40s, had been at NTV for 14 years. She was one of the most \u2014 if not the most \u2014 popular personality the channel had. On her nightly show, Banu Guven Plus (Banu Guven Ile Arti), she interviewed experts, academics and politicians about current events, often on controversial issues.<\/p>\n

NTV said in a statement Monday that Ms. Guven was fired because there was no suitable program format for her in the next season. The channel also rejected her accusation that it had bent to pressure from the government on stories and guest selection, and that it was guilty of self-censorship.<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil today, we have not faced requests from the government or any political party to work with this or that person,\u201d Cem Aydin, managing director NTV owner the Dogus Group, wrote in Monday\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n

Ms. Guven\u2019s last programs focused on Turkey\u2019s Kurdish problem, arguably the country\u2019s most sensitive issue and the subject of close to three decades of armed struggle between Kurdish minority rebels and the Turkish state. Tens of thousands of Kurds have died, and recently tensions have risen again, with Mr. Erdogan taking a strong stand against Kurdish demands.<\/p>\n

In early June, Ms. Guven\u2019s program infuriated Turkish nationalists after Vedat Turkali, a novelist and playwright, spoke favorably of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party, or (PKK), on air. He said Mr. Ocalan should be interviewed in the program, too.<\/p>\n

The channel also turned down Ms. Guven\u2019s request to interview Leyla Zana, the most controversial Kurdish politician in Turkey. She saw this as an act of self-censorship and was fired soon afterwards.<\/p>\n

NTV isn\u2019t known as one of Turkey\u2019s slavishly pro-government channels \u2014 but it seems to have lost any appetite for controversy. In his statement Monday, Dogus Group Aydin said that after the Turkali interview NTV had received threats to burn down its building.<\/p>\n

NTV was changing, Mr. Aydin said, to bring more \u201creal experts\u201d to the screen and to avoid conflicting perceptions of the channel. \u201cNTV is a channel which is viewed as close to the opposition by to those trying to be close to the government; pro-government by the opposition; pro-Kurdish by Turkish nationalists; and nationalist by the Kurds,\u201d the statement read, adding that this had become \u201ctiring and wearisome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever the cause, Ms. Guven\u2019s firing has fed into a widening perception that media freedoms in Turkey are getting weaker. Last year, the Paris-based Reporters without Borders ranked Turkey 138th in media freedom out of 178 countries \u2014 down from the 98th place in 2005.<\/p>\n

\u201c(This problem) deserves attention from citizens, from lawyers, because it seems to me inconsistent with all the other advances that Turkey has made,\u201d Mrs. Clinton said in a televised interview Saturday.<\/p>\n

via Zipped-Lips in Turkey\u2019s Media – Emerging Europe Real Time – WSJ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ayla Albayrak U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a visit to Istanbul this weekend, rapped Turkey\u2019s government for suppressing press freedoms. She had in mind the jailing of reporters and closure of internet websites. Less talked about is what many Turkish journalists describe as growing self-censorship exercised by media outlets in Turkey and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":37868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[6451,6483],"class_list":["post-37866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-banu-guven","tag-ntv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}