"Personal Disarmament and Violence News in Turkey" Local Media Seminars
1. Edition
December 2007
220 Pages
INTRODUCTION
With hope for tomorrow,
Nazire Dedeman
Founding President of the Umut Foundation
December 2007
220 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Media is one of the most important areas that reflect the mentality, perception and the culture of a society. Therefore all the segments working to provide social benefit should analyze the points of intersection with the media very well especially regarding the cases they work on. More importantly, just as Turkey does not just consist of big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, media does not just comprise of “mainstream media”. Local media is a vitally important ground which will provide us the opportunity to see the lives in those other regions of our country, which we don’t see or forget to look at and enable us to have a broader viewpoint.
As we were starting our "Personal Disarmament and Violence News in Turkey" Local Media Seminar Project aware of the importance of the local media our aim was to question the ingrained templates together with our journalist friends taking part and to replace the wrong ones with the correct ones. We should bear in mind that a journalist is a story-teller but he/she exists first of all as a human not as a journalist within the world of incidents and we should accept the fact that the violence news affect them first of all as a human-being and the templates they use when they are reflecting the daily life templates they are part as in fact part of the social mentality of the society. The media and the veteran journalists in the media, when materializing the information derived from what has happened in the society create or affect both social mentality and perception and at the same time as part of the social world they share the same mentality and perception. Therefore journalists enabling the news and information flow in the local and the mainstream media are the most valuable contributors to any effort, which will help transforming the social mindset especially for a violence-free community.
We realized the first one of these Local Media Seminars in Diyarbakır and the second one in Rize. The book you are holding is a collection of all the papers presented and the debate sessions which clearly reflect the opinions of the seminar participants. These seminars have been an extremely important ground for very efficient exchange of information and experience and most important of all a medium for enriching our viewpoint in terms of the work we do as a result of the experiences we share with every one of our journalist friends working for the local media. Therefore I would like to thank all of our journalist friends taking part and sharing their knowledge and experiences. I sincerely would like to thank Nail Güreli, Mr. Att. Fikret İlkiz, Dr. Ayhan Akcan, Prof. Dr. Nurçay Türkoğlu, Mr Ragıp Duran, Dr. Recep Yaşar, Asst. Prof. Dr. Sevilay Çelenk and Mr. Barış Günaydın for giving up their valuable time and taking part in both of our seminars with presentations; additionally Mr. Kasım Esen, the Governor of Rize, Mr. Ahmet Şefik Mollamehmetoğlu, President of Trabzon Journalists’ Association for chairing the Rize Seminar and Mr Faik Bakoğlu, President of Rize Journalists’ Association.
Finally I would like to thank Istanbul Consulate General of The Netherlands for their financial support in realization of both of these seminars.
With hope for tomorrow,
Nazire Dedeman
Founding President of the Umut Foundation