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)–