The dumbing down of mainstream Turkish media

For those who are not familiar, Hürriyet is one of our major national newspapers in Turkey. It is not a tabloid by any stretch of the imagination; these people purport to print actual news, and they have the reputation for doing just that. Although one can find the standard number of feature and/or lifestyle pieces (especially on the weekend), the main idea behind Hürriyet is that they report breaking news, politics (both Turkish and international), and major events that would be of interest to your average news-seeking reader.

Now, to shift topic a bit: those of you who have known me long enough or have been paying extra careful attention will know that before I lived in Antalya, I resided for a year in a little town called Kemer, which is about 40km from here. At the risk of coming across as dismissive, Kemer does not have much to recommend it aside from the mountains and beaches, and when you take into account that pretty much every town and city along the Turkish Riviera has those exact same mountains and beaches… well, let’s just say it’s not the first place I’d tell you to visit. It’s not that Kemer is a bad town, but it does attract a very specific kind of tourist (the noisy, drunk, slutty club-goer, to put the finest point possible on it), so if you’re staying there and you’re not into the frantic-club-hopping-followed-by-going-home-with-a-random-stranger scene, the place loses its charm quite quickly.

So, given what you now know about both Hürriyet and Kemer, you can imagine my disappointment when, a couple of days ago, our respected national newspaper reported on its front page a story alleging that several persons in Kemer had witnessed the appearance of a UFO. An unnamed person on the scene submitted these amateur photographs as evidence of said object:

Have you stopped laughing yet? Great, let’s continue.

Okay, aside from not being unidentified, the object is not flying, either— as frame 6 clearly shows, it is in fact a common garden variety street lamp, at a distance of about ten metres. And as anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes on flickr.com can tell you, the other five frames are manually unfocused bokeh dots of the exact same street lamp, with varying degrees of aperture interference, or perhaps a bit of Photoshop.

Now, before you go calling hoax, I have another theory. You see, this alleged UFO was apparently spotted at 3:30 in the morning, which just so happens to be around the time that the first wave of club goers comes stumbling out of the clubs, all tripping over each other, laughing at things that don’t exist, and vomiting in various directions. So my educated guess, as a former resident of Kemer, is that drunken clubbers saw a street lamp that appeared to be going in and out of focus and darting around (side effect of consuming most of the alcohol in Turkey in a single evening), and people in that state don’t know how to work their cameras. Simple.

Nonetheless, whether it was a hoax or just a drunken misunderstanding, Hürriyet should have known better than to print this level of crap, and to place the story on the front page is just inexcusable. As a photojournalist myself, I personally could have dug up several local stories that would have been more appropriate for a national paper, if they were that desperate for a quirky front-pager, and it would have saved them the embarrassment of having to resort to reporting identified non-flying objects.

So how about a job, Hürriyet? I’m available for freelancing whenever you’re ready to start having an A-game to bring.

On second thought, given the direction things appear to be going for them, I’m not sure I’d want that on my résumé.