“We Need A New Journalism Ethic”

On its 3rd day, IPS Communication Foundation’s OHO program has resumed yesterday with newsrooms visits to Agos newspaper and Hayat TV, as well as keynote speeches of İncilay Cangöz and Mahmut Çınar.

The program hosts 24 new journalist candidates from 22 different universities, allowing them to interact with and learn from media professionals and academicians from various backgrounds.  

OHO’s third day kicked off with the newsroom visit of Agos newspaper - a prominent weekly newspaper in Armenian and Turkish. 

Agos newspaper editor-in-chief Rober Koptaş lectured OHO participants on some of the long-lasting issues concerning the Armenian community in Turkey. He also briefed about the role of Agos newspaper to respond to the Armenian communities needs and concerns. 

"There is no single venue in the center of Hayat” 

Later on, OHO participants visited Hayat TV and met its General Broadcasting Coordinator Mustafa Kara who counted on channel’s history and how they worked. 

He mentioned about the challenges on how to create an alternative voice in TV networks - which he claimed to be more difficult task than creating an alternative publication. “We have departed to create an alternative TV channel,” he said. 

“Peace journalism must be a mindful choice” 

OHO program resumed with keynote speeches in the afternoon. İncilay Cangöz, associate professor of communication in Anadolu University, discussed the “News Ethic and Necessity of Peace Journalism” with an emphasis on journalism’s current issues and possibility of doing peace journalism. 

Today’s journalism is leaning towards a totally different sector under the influence of North American journalism codes and norms in close relation with trade and capitalism, she stated. “We need a new journalism ethic,” she underlined.  

"Words are an important field of struggle” 

Mahmut Çınar, a communications lecturer at Bahçeşehir University, made a presentation on media and hate speech, saying that LGBT’s new slogan “Consider that we are maggots” constituted a good example on the struggle against hate speech. 

He listed some of the ways in which one could define hate speech as follows: 

* Defining the normal,

* Emphasizing on the sentiments of majority’s identity,

* Distinguishing the other,

* Re-producing prejudices against those who are not the majority, 

* Using stereotypes and re-producing them. 

“Government needs Kurdish media” 

Özgür Gündem newspaper editor Bayram Balcı held the last keynote speech of yesterday’s OHO program. He shared with journalist candidates his experience of working in Kurdish media in Turkey and showed a video prepared for the 20th anniversary of Özgür Gündem - a newspaper established in 1992. 

“We had people who wrote about what the government didn’t want to be known or heard. They exist today and they will exist in the future, too.” (CU/EK/BM)