Media and Power in Turkey: Insight into P24

The Source
20 February 2014

In Turkey, citizens now have the option to go online and read viable news websites to see what the print newspapers aren’t reporting.
“Newspapers have a limited shelf life. People are moving to electronic media, and in Turkey, this process needs to be accelerated,” said  Andrew Finkel, founder and vice-president of P24, a NED grantee and Turkish language website NGO.
P24’s mission is to strengthen the integrity of independent media in Turkey. It does this through a wide range of activities from press monitoring, organising investigative journalism bursaries, journalistic training and public advocacy.
P24 currently produces a daily review of what the press in Turkey isn’t saying. They hope that the website will increasingly become a platform for press integrity issues. This is essential because the media landscape in Turkey has been deteriorating.
“In the 1990s, newspapers were the things that got you influence. Now, owning a newspaper is a liability. It’s an imposition that the governments puts on you if you want to do business with them.”
Despite Turkey’s longstanding spotlight as a jailor of journalists and media adversary, Finkel is encouraged because of each generation’s ability to create their own new media to reflect the spirit of the age.
Andrew Finkel, founder of P24, discusses the plight of media in Turkey with NED staff.
“The government, of course, will not turn down the free gift of a compliant press,” he said, but each generation in Turkey is equally strong and willing to push for a press that doesn’t polarize and chooses to present different sides of complex issues.
While the media in Turkey certainly face a battle before they can call themselves free, Finkel thinks that the situation is quite simple. “The government has been caught stealing, and they are doing everything the can to close the curtain on what everyone has seen…[This] is putting huge pressure on the media, but it is also creating huge opportunities.”
Read more about media in Turkey in Finkel’s latest Freedom House report, Democracy in Crisis: Corruption, Media, and Power in Turkey.