Picture by Carmen Alonso Suarez / Flickr.com (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Some rights reserved.While western technology giants and regulators are plagued by the vast spread of fake news to the extent that foreign actors can meddle with national elections, Turkey is dealing with the disinformation in conventional media which traditionally have strong gatekeeping mechanisms. As legal monitoring mechanisms fade away and press ethics are no longer a reference point for journalism, how to prevent fake news in mass media is becoming an ever more important question in the country.
The Turkish audience witnessed a fierce media ethics debate among renowned journalists in the past months. The hot topic was the alleged incest case of a TV celebrity. The scandal burst when intimate photos of Murat Basoglu, a former TV host, appeared in the media. As the vehement debate went on among the public, Melis Alphan, a columnist for Hurriyet daily, claimed that incest rate among the Turkish population is 40 percent and that the Basoglu case was no exception. Blunt expression of this figure immediately vexed many. Ahmet Hakan Coskun, another columnist of the paper and an influential media figure, objected to the number Alphan mentioned, saying, in a derisive tone, that if the claimed figure is accurate it means that almost half of the Turkish population have domestic sex.
Alphan’s claim was based on a study by an NGO, whose details had never been revealed to the public. She wrote, in her controversial piece, that the only detail the organization shared with the public was that 4 out of every 10 people are in an incest relationship. Accuracy of the figure and how the study was conducted still lie in obscurity.
