The symposium, titled ""Peace Journalism: Examples from Turkey and the World," was organized by the Boğaziçi University Peace Education, Research and Application Center and the Contemporary and Independent Mutual Aid Association (ÇABA). Although all the speakers expressed their concerns about an increasing lack of quality and shallowness in media coverage of the world's conflicts, they nevertheless stressed that there are still true "peace journalists" and that these journalists may bring an end to the status quo in contemporary media. Delivering the event's inaugural speech, Boğaziçi University Vice Chancellor Gülen Aktaş pointed out the importance of peace journalism in the contemporary world, where she said there is a pervasive misconception that wars can only be ended with more wars. "Unfortunately, this argument is widespread in Turkey, too. We cannot build up a conception based on totally destroying the opposition to solve a problem," she said.
Assistant Professor Fatoş Erkman, the manager of the Peace Education, Research and Application Center, emphasized that education is a very important tool for promoting peace journalism in the media. "The promotion of non-violent solutions carries vital importance, and the media has a fundamental effect on this," Erkman said, adding that the media have an important role in the contemporary world heretofore unseen in its history.
The moderator of the symposium's first session, Hürriyet daily writer Ferai Tınç, said the increasingly violent tendencies in media are not just a problem for readers, but for those in the media sector as well. "In recent years, we journalists also began to find a way to move away from concerns about ratings. Unfortunately, we are experiencing a situation where violent styles are valued," she said. She pointed out that the decade between 2001 and 2010 had been declared the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Washington State University Associate Dean Susan Dente Ross explained the concept of peace journalism in the first session. Turkish television station NTV News Editor Mete Çubukçu, Lebanese Al Moustakbal daily Editor-in-Chief Micheal Naoufal, Southeastern Journalists Association head and Hürriyet daily correspondent Faruk Balıkçı -- correspondents with experience in the Middle East -- spoke on the subject of peace journalism in problematic regions.
Ross elaborated on the concept of peace journalism with examples of the language BBC television uses in its coverage of the conflict between Palestine and Israel. "Some of the media coverage tried to portray Hamas as if they were not elected by the Palestinian people democratically," Ross said, lamenting that bad news is still considered good business. "A journalist should feel a deep sense of responsibility for communication and be deeply conscious," she said, citing the examples of peace journalists in some of the parts of the US, South Korea, India, Turkey, Cyprus and the Philippines.
Naoufal -- a journalist and political analyst who covered the Islamic revolution of Iran, the Iraq-Iran war, the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict and many others -- stated that the media serve as an alternative to parliamentary life in the Middle East. "With the help of TV stations like Al Jazeera, Al Arabia and many others, the media is constructing a platform on the conflict, and people began to wonder what was actually happening in hot areas," he said, pointing out that written media have an advantage over the visual press since it has the capacity to show a situation with all its historical, social and cultural complexities. "I believe that peace in the Middle East cannot be achieved any time soon, but the only way we have is to make a great effort toward it."
Highlighting the intense demand for war in the Turkish media coverage of Turkey's conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the northern Iraq conflict, Turkish journalist Mete Çubukçu argued that the media had constructed an immense expectation of war in Turkish society by using archived video footage. "Unfortunately, in most of the Turkish coverage, the intentions overcame the facts. My suggestion to peace journalists while covering news is to include the facts and figures, with the addition of a fair perspective. If the reporter maintains a similar distance from the victim and the oppressor, that would not be fair," he said, emphasizing that the human aspect of the conflicts should always be taken into consideration. "We should disturb people with emotional and startling methods, if necessary, to prevent violence."
In the second session of the symposium, the example of positive and negative approaches to Turkish-Greek relations was discussed by Galatasaray University lecturer Ragıp Duran and Greece SKAI TV journalist Aris Chatzistefanou. In the last session, peace journalism was analyzed from a female perspective by Sevda Alankuş from the Eastern Mediterranean University in northern Cyprus, Yasemin Temizarabacı from the Media Monitoring Group of Women (MEDİZ), Betül Çelik from Sabancı University and Özlem Zehebi from ÇABA.
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