Indignation all around: alleged military coup plotters wanted to use journalists in their plans to overthrow the government. Daily newspaper Taraf recently revealed yet another coup plan, and it contains two lists: one of 137 names of journalists who would be asked to cooperate with the coup plotters to help create a chaotic atmosphere in the country, which would ‘justify’ …
A journalist, says Fatih Özyar, doesn’t just write an article about something he isn’t sure about. True, that’s how it should be. But is that really what happened?
Özyar writes for the biggest daily newspaper in Turkey, Hürriyet. He is the correspondent for Hürriyet in the Netherlands. A few days ago he reported that a journalist from the Netherlands, Armand Sag, …
The government is doing nice things for journalists: the discounts for press card holders have been extended. Most of the public transport is already free all over the country, but now my colleagues and I can also get discounts (up to 50%!) with some privately owned long-distance bus companies, and for flights with national carrier Turkish Airlines. And, this is …
Let me explain something about my work. Some people who react to my websites, both here and in the Dutch version, don’t understand that there are actually opinions published here. ‘You are a journalist aren’t you, so you have to be neutral and objective!’ The thing is that, as a journalist, you can’t do more than try to be objective …
The judiciary and the Kurdish initiative
The surrender of a group of 34 men, women and children – some of them PKK members, some of them ordinary inhabitants of a refugee camp for Turkish Kurds in northern Iraq – was the first visible result of the government’s Kurdish initiative, launched this summer. By sending the ‘peace group’ (as the PKK calls it) to Turkey, …
Sometimes I just can’t take it anymore. I mean this country, the news. Like the fuss that started here this week about a new state TV series, Ayrılık (seperation), that is pretty anti-Israel. It’s just another ‘dizi’ (series) and in this one Israeli soldiers shoot little Palestinian girls in the heart. The anti-Israeli stance in this country started getting …
Network site myspace.com has been closed down in Turkey. It’s not totally clear yet why, but it’s said it has to do with copyright laws being infringed. On myspace, a lot of music is shared among members, and it’s of course feasible that in the process copyrights are not always respected. Which is illegal, but hardly a reason to close …
What to think of the immense tax fine that Dogan Media Group was hit with this week? At 3.7 billion Turkish Liras ($ 2.5 billion), it’s a shocking amount of money. Of course, the debate about whether Dogan Media Group has really been cheating on taxes or whether it’s just another step in the efforts by the AKP government to …
I’m watching the Turkish news. Last weekend, four soldiers were killed by a PKK bomb in the southeast of the country, and yesterday and today they were buried. Some TV news bulletins start with pictures of the funerals: slow motion images of the coffin, wrapped in a Turkish flag, the now widowed wife falling on the coffin crying, the soldier’s …
When talking about the Kurdish issue and the initiative that the AKP government is taking to solve the problems, it sometimes seems that there is a big gap between Turks and Kurds. That the whole matter is black and white, two adversaries standing opposite each other. That this is not the case becomes clearer now that the Kurdish question is …
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