Turkey, Balkan countries suffer from media ethics problems

“The media in Turkey is in a deep identity crisis because of the massive democratization process. This puts an enormous pressure on society,” said Yavuz Baydar, newsroom ombudsman at the Sabah daily.

He was a speaker at a European Union and UNESCO-sponsored conference yesterday which gathered representatives from civil society and media in Southeast Europe and Turkey in order to discuss ways to align the media in those countries with the standards of the EU.

“In this region more than anywhere else, we need to have an independent press because our countries are in transition,” Baydar said, adding that people in the region have suffered from political oppression for too long, but there is no guarantee that the newcomers in the political arena are going to have only “good intentions.”

“New forces in politics have their own desires for power. The public has a deep mistrust of the governments and media,” he said.

Referring to the inadequacy of the Turkish Press Council, a civil society organization of journalists and newspapers in Turkey that seeks to promote truthful news and the right to a correction of errors, he said that media ombudsmanship has been trying to fill the gap, but it has been institutionalized in only a few newspapers in the country.

“The ombudsmanship model has been easy to adopt and establish as opposed to other models in which you have to be engaged in endless consensus-seeking,” he said.

In some Balkan countries, the model of the press council works to an extent, as indicated by Ljiljana Zurovac, executive director of the Press Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Zurovac said that the current media scene is “very bad” in her country.

“We have good laws but bad practice,” she said. “The media is divided by ethno-territorial principles or by economic or political influence.”

Established in 2000, the Press Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the first media regulatory body in Southeast Europe. It has a board of directors comprised of eight newspaper owners and one journalist. It also has a complaint commission comprised of two journalists and six public representatives.

“They are independent of the board. No one can influence their decision,” she said, and added that they generally received 30-40 complaints a year until last year, when the number of complaints reached more than 100. The council solves disputes between the public and the press by using journalistic remedies such as encouraging the right to reply and publishing retractions, apologies and denials.

“This is free, quick and more efficient than court procedures dealing with complaints against the media,” she said.

Talking about the difficulty in telling journalists that it is themselves who should regulate the media scene, not politicians or commercial interest groups, she added that the public needs to push journalists to do that.

Pointing out the same issue of public demand for good journalism practices, Halit Esendemir, head of the recently founded Media Ethics Council in Turkey, said at the conference that UNESCO and the EU should do more in that regard.

“There should be efforts to inform the public about their rights when the issue is the media,” he said.

Remzi Lani, director of the Albanian Media Institute, said that the Balkans remain as unfinished business after the fall of the Berlin War and conflicts in the region.

He emphasized that the media is free but not independent in the region.

“Journalists no longer go to prison, but they are pressured. And governments sometimes use tax authorities to do that,” he added.

After several national roundtable meetings, the international conference in İstanbul yesterday and more meetings this year, participants expect that their efforts will accelerate plans to set up self-regulation models that work.