(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
partisan press and Turkish press and discusses Turkish media’s present monopolistic situation
and the partisan press. Çalık Group close to actual government holds Sabah newspaper and
Atv broadcasting channel. Supported also by the government Çalık Group grows stronger and
is classified according to Sözcü newspaper (AKP, 2009: 4), among the most successful
holdings of the last 6 years where Prime Minister’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak is the General
Manager. The Group, 17 companies in 2002 doubled and reached 34 companies in total in
2009. Group’s assets attained 3 billion US where it used to be 600 million US in 2002.
According to another source, Kaya who mentioned that Sabah is partisan press, this amount is
2 billion US. Çalık Group cooperates with Italian ENI in Samsun-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline
construction (Kaya, 2009: 264). In this perspective Sabah newspaper can be exemplified as a
partisan press. The study includes news 15 days before the Elections and analyzes
newspaper’s approach to political parties of Turkish Grand National Assembly such as
government party Justice and Development Party (AKP), main opposition party Republican
People’s Party (CHP) and opposition party Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Partisan
press issue has a considerable importance in journalism and in media because partisan
newspapers are unable to fulfill their primordial social role of being objective and by the way
satisfy public’s need of being informed objectively.
Press in Social Role Context
In plural-liberalistic approach media is supposed to be the 4 th Estate after Legislative,
Judiciary and Executive Estate. Media fulfills this function by reflecting public opinion in
social agenda and controlling the ruling power. In other words media is assumed to have the
gatekeeper role and create an opinion market in liberal democracies. Consequently media is
the “guarantor” of continuous democratic system and citizens’ contribution to that process
(İrvan 1995: 76). This attribution of this role to press relies on perception which appeared
during press freedom struggle era (Keane, 1993). In this frame it is absolutely required to
present objectively the news according to newsworthiness criteria and respect the ethical
rules. In this way, in the frame of liberal press understanding there are three dimensions:
objective news ideal, newsworthiness criteria and news ethic principles (Özer, 2008).
Liberal press’ approach to news and media can be expressed as follow: News can be
presented objectively according to approaches; reporter is a professional keen on
understanding and communicating the social realities, he searches for the source and
has/should have an equal distance to each source. He can/should write well-balanced articles.
He can/should have different interpretation. He can/should deliver his source without any
interpretation or in quotation in the name of objectivity. Journalism is a professional
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