‘Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter,’ bellowed Turkey’s President Erdogan as he officially launched the country’s first and only global English language public broadcaster this week. Thousands gathered for the booze-free spectacular to welcome TRT World onto their screens.
But elsewhere in Turkey, the media has been punished. In 2016 more than a hundred media outlets have been closed. Thousands of journalists have been left unemployed and many have been jailed, all for simply being a potential thorn in the side of Erdogan. So when I heard the President saying TRT World was needed to tell Turkey’s story, because other channels are ‘partial’, I almost choked.
Over the last 18 months I have watched this fledgling channel with some interest. It was described in the initial days as being Erdogan’s pet project. And it’s certainly lived up to that. Like many public broadcasters it focuses on telling the story from the local perspective, except this is a rather one-dimensional perspective, taken directly from Erdogan’s dictum.
‘Every time I cover something in Turkey, I wait for the inevitable call,’ one of the channel’s journalists recently told me over a coffee.
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