Türkiye'de Ulusal Basında Çevre Haberciliği Üzerine Eleştirel Bir İnceleme

Abstract

Since the second half of 20th century, planetary-scale anthropogenic destruction of ecology brought environmental issues into the very center of political and public agenda. The media facilitates policy, community, and science stakeholders to interact, easing to identify and understand environmental issues that may lead to study and develop solutions. This research, which is based on relations between environment and media, discusses environmental journalism in a framework of principles regarding the ethical and political responsibility of media. To focus on the performance of environmental journalism, issues experienced in this area and their respective causes are studied to trace the footsteps of qualified journalism within an ethical framework. For this purpose, six national media organizations in Turkey (Akşam, Birgün, Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Milliyet, and Sabah) that reflect different political views, are analyzed. In the context of environmental journalism, a sample of contents based on three independent environmental incidents (A mining facility in Cerattepe, a nuclear power plant in Akkuyu, and the third airport of Istanbul), represented by two separate events that took place in the past five years, are examined by qualitative, content, and discourse analyses. Conclusions gathered in this study reveal, how the cultural, political and social conditions in the media, reflect on the presentation of environmental news. News about environmental issues, are handled within a purely political and ideological frame of reference. Another major finding of the study suggests that the national press perform fairly low on basic journalistic qualities and even lower on environmental journalism quality criteria. Finally, in order to develop environmental journalism as a specialization field in Turkey, the media could implement methods that are presented in this study.