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ANKARA: News, Commentary And The Exercise Of Judgment

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  • ANKARA: News, Commentary And The Exercise Of Judgment

    NEWS, COMMENTARY AND THE EXERCISE OF JUDGMENT
    David Judson

    Turkish Daily News
    Aug 25 2008

    As readers of the Turkish Daily News are aware, we correct our
    inevitable errors and omissions in a timely basis, usually on this page
    above the standing policy statement "Getting it right." Sometimes
    we have to go beyond just setting the record straight, however,
    to a restatement of our policy and values. This is one of those times.

    So this column is first a correction and an apology to Richard
    Giragosian, a guest whose essay Friday was drastically changed. It
    was just one word, inserted by a copy editor. But it was a word at the
    core of unresolved disputes between many Turks and Armenians and thus
    the change was drastic. Giragosian said "genocide." We edited that to
    "alleged genocide." While the change reflected prevailing sentiment
    at this newspaper, it also violated our rules on the treatment of
    commentary.

    The journalistic navigation through this set of linguistic shoals
    is always difficult. And at the TDN we face many such challenges
    every day. We are unusual if not unique among Turkish newspapers
    in that we publish in English. But that is not all that sets us
    apart. Unlike many newspapers, we do not have an "agenda," nor do
    we seek any specific outcome in the many deep debates that define
    Turkish society. International readers are an important constituency,
    but we are not a "newspaper for foreigners." In fact, a majority of our
    readers are Turks who obviously come to us for reasons other than the
    English language. In one sense, our job is simple: a concise snapshot
    of Turkey each day. But in another sense our job is quite complex,
    for the picture is always one of many hues.

    As much is subjective, no memo on guidelines or rulebook can entirely
    suffice. Intelligent judgment that reflects our broader values,
    by each and every reporter and editor, is the only policy with a
    chance of success. So it is worth a bit of ink and newsprint to again
    share the reasoning that defines our policy on news, translation and
    commentary, in particular for our new readers and new staffers of
    whom we have quite a few.

    Striving to reflect views of all sides

    I will get to the anatomy of the error. But first let me share
    a little about the TDN. As I say, it is a complex newspaper, in
    a complex country at a complex time of history. On the editorial
    side, we have about 50 staffers who are as remarkable for the depth
    of their education as they are for the breadth of their worldviews
    and backgrounds. This is no accident. Enabling Turkey's stories to
    be told by authentic voices is at the heart of the mission I have
    sought to articulate at the newspaper; that we are succeeding is,
    I hope, self-evident. Each day we also rely heavily on the expansive
    resources of our corporate parent Hurriyet, the flagship of the
    Dogan Media Group, and our sister newspaper Referans, the national
    business daily. We subscribe to two domestic news agencies and
    four international news agencies. As with all good newspapers, we
    also collaborate with an ever-expanding network of informal partners
    ranging from the Turkish Policy Quarterly to the Slovak Foreign Policy
    Association to the Athens daily Kathimerini to make this portrait
    of diversity even more so. I have remarked on a number of occasions
    that we are perhaps the only newspaper in the world where Mahmud
    Ahmadinejad or George Bush or Vladimir Putin or Raul Castro could
    pop into the newsroom and quickly find a sympathetic face ready to
    take him to lunch. People usually think I am kidding. I am not.

    Each day this tiny and hyper-diverse team casts its literal and
    figurative net broadly. About mid-day, what began as an information
    gathering marathon transforms to a news production sprint of
    translation, editing, final phone calls, rewrites and headlines. In
    the news environment in which we work, of war and imminent war on a
    variety of borders, of intense ideological competition at home, of
    bare-knuckle politics, of social transformation at breakneck speed,
    the task can be daunting. It works only because of hundreds of judgment
    calls made by everyone at each step. These are judgments made in the
    context I seek to describe.

    So what is the context that binds a team in the exercise of
    judgment? It is a commitment to democracy. It is a commitment to free
    expression. It is a commitment to playing it straight. I do not ask
    the practitioners at the TDN to feign a lack of conviction on views or
    principles they hold dear; I do insist on transparency and candor so
    that we can collectively maintain balance and fairness. We strive not
    just to reflect the views of "both sides" but to reflect the views of
    "all sides." Our reporter Ekrem Ekinci, a philosophy graduate, helped
    me out the other day in a chat where I was to trying to articulate
    this. Our work at the TDN, he suggested, is less a pursuit of the
    "objectivity" offered up in journalism school curriculum than it is
    a pursuit of the "enlarged mentality" advocated by Immanuel Kant,
    the ability to perceive and understand perspectives different than
    your own without surrender of your own beliefs.

    So, for example, we don't take an editorial position on the issue
    of "minorities" in Turkey which classes Armenians, Greeks and Jews
    as statutory minorities but does not acknowledge such distinctions
    for Kurds, Alevis, Assyrians and many others. We do, however, have a
    standing explanatory "box" on the history of this issue and the 1923
    Lausanne Treaty that started it all. This runs next to stories where
    this terminology comes up.

    Wording on religious and ethnic issues

    Readers are used to seeing the sourcing above stories "TDN with wire
    dispatches." Commonly, stories that we derive from other media sources
    will not be as complete as our standard demands. Sometimes it is an
    extra phone call to the subject of the story; sometimes it is a bit
    of background or context that we add. And we routinely eschew language
    common in other media that could be seen as disparaging. You will not,
    for example, find a reference to "Arab capital" in the TDN's business
    pages but rather its national source, be it Kuwait or Saudi Arabia
    or Dubai. A writer once insisted that it was legitimate to describe
    a Russian billionaire as a "Jewish oligarch." Not unless the story is
    about his donations to a synogogue. Religious or ethnic adjectives in
    front of the noun are fine only when they are relevant to the subject
    matter. That writer no longer works at the TDN.

    And when it comes to that debate of how to describe the events in the
    murderous final days of the Ottoman Empire, we avoid in translation
    "sözde" or "so-called" to modify Armenian claims of genocide. A
    "so-called" genocide connotes disparagement, an "alleged genocide"
    denotes the current state of legal and historical debate. This is
    the kind of sensitivity, judgment and "enlarged mentality" that we
    try to bring to the news pages. And the news is often radically edited.

    Different scale for editorial pages

    The editorial pages require judgment on a different scale. For here our
    license is more restricted. Our constraints include Turkish press law,
    standards of decency and a wariness toward recklessness. We endeavor to
    clean up the basic elements of grammar when necessary and sometimes
    edit for necessary brevity. But as our standing statement reads,
    "few views are unwelcome on the pages of the TDN." We will, upon my
    judgment or that of another editor, include a disclosure in the case
    of controversial claims by a guest columnist that go starkly against
    prevailing views: "The views expressed above are the author's own and
    do not reflect the views of the TDN," is the note we will add. But
    we do not ever, under any circumstances, change the direct meaning
    or intent of commentary. We might well reject it in its entirety. But
    if we run it, respect to the author's views is fundamental.

    Do we always execute these goals of judgment without
    flaw? No. Sometimes we fail which means we start anew. And on Friday
    this values-based policy ran aground. We violated this trust with
    our readers.

    "I have watched with interest your coverage of Armenia and
    Armenian-Turkish affairs. All to the good. However, Richard
    Giragosian's piece today 'Armenia and the new Turkish proposal'
    while otherwise worthy has the word "alleged" in reference to the
    Armenian genocide of 1915," wrote a reader in Montreal, Richard
    Elliot. "Mr. Giragosian has confirmed that his original text did not
    contain the word "alleged" and that the TDN added it without consulting
    him and without disclosing in the paper that the word was not in the
    original text. This is unethical from a journalistic point-of-view. It
    also casts doubt on the TDN's willingness to publish opinions not
    in conformity with the official Turkish position. Finally, it causes
    embarrassment to Mr. Giragosian, a respected analyst and commentator
    who has taken the risk of being published in a Turkish paper, who
    must now explain that his text has been altered substantively."

    Mr. Elliot could not be more right. We could not be more wrong. We
    apologize. And now, our values restated, we go back to work.

    --Boundary_(ID_OxqGqGeNArWw7hvU1avBsw)--
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