Turkey's Struggle for Media Freedom: Medyascope

In 2015, Rusen Cakir started to create videos from his office in Haberturk newspaper in which he made commentaries about the Turkish political agenda. In a couple of months he invited some of his friends before the camera, and subsequently the project of Medyascope.tv was initiated on 20th of August. Since then, Medyascope.tv has improved rapidly. Today, Medyascope.tv has a semi-professional studio with live broadcast equipment, around 30 paid employees and more than 50 different programs that are being broadcasted regularly. It can be considered as an alternative news medium in the Turkish public sphere.

The alternative that Medyascope.tv created is recognized by international organizations, and was awarded with the International Press Institute’s Free Media Pioneer award in 2016 and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and TV5MONDE’s Press Freedom Prize in 2017 (Medyascope.tv n.d.)

With the slogan of Medyascope.tv is always free (word-for-word translation: 'because its free'), Rusen Cakir (2018) repeatedly underlines that it is not activism that they do in Medyascope.tv, but exclusively free, neutral and honest journalism:

"Medyascope was founded with the aim to address issues surrounding freedom of the press in Turkey, along with the vision to introduce independent journalists to the right digital tools and to provide them with a self-sufficient, easy to use and sustainable platform to reach large audiences in a swift and uncensored manner.” (Cakir 2016)

Medyascope.tv is one of the rare examples of alternative journalism which incorporates many digital platforms and operates in a discourse of freedom instead of opposition. This article analyses the form of Medyascope.tv, the types of content that it creates and disseminates, the social media outlets and tools that they utilize, and the sources of its income as well as current challenges that limit this impact.

Method and Content

Medyascope.tv operates in six different languages. While the majority of the videos are in Turkish, there are weekly programs which originally are broadcasted in English, Kurdi and Arabic. In addition to these, some programs are translated afterwards from Turkish to German and French as well as English, Kurdi and Arabic.

Seven different online platforms are actively used by Medyascope.tv, in accordance with those platforms’ characteristics. Most of their content are live broadcasts (be it a debate, news or interview), and these live feeds are broadcasted from Medyascope.tv’s Periscope and YouTube accounts. Audio files of those programs are also uploaded to Soundcloud and Spotify as podcasts.

Along with their own website, where they publish text-based news or translations, Mediyscope.tv also shares announcements and links for programs on Facebook and Twitter. Meanwhile, the platforms that include video (or audio) content also serve as a database for older broadcasts as well. Among these platforms, Periscope becomes prominent as it is the initial starting point for broadcasts as well as an inspiration in naming Medyascope.tv.

Currently, Medyascope.tv has more than 120.000 followers on Twitter, 113.000 subscribers on YouTube, nearly 52.000 followers on Periscope, 16.000 followers on Facebook, and 3.000 followers on Soundcloud. Sadly, Spotify does not share its statistics. It should be noted that these numbers do not show a total sum of people that follow Medyascope.tv since same people could follow them in multiple platforms.

View numbers are also observable on YouTube. The view numbers vary in a large scale, depending on the reputation of producer as well as interviewee and the specific topic. For example, while the cultural broadcasts like cinema programs have views between 200 and 1.000; Rusen Cakir’s daily commentary videos on political atmosphere might get up to 90.000 views in total (generally its around 30.000), depending on the topic of the videos. Other veteran journalists such as Kadri Gursel and Kemal Can, who lost their jobs in mainstream Turkish media not long ago, are also getting high numbers of views compared to contents created by less-experienced journalists of Medyascope.tv.

Funding

As Rusen Cakir (2018) states, the major part of the income of Medyascope.tv is funded by international organizations. On its website, four organizations are listed as supporters to Medyascope.tv. Three of them are NGO’s: the Chrest Foundation from the United States, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung from Germany, and The European Endowment for Democracy. State funded Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency is also among these supportive organizations (Medyascope.tv n.d.).

Apart from international funding, Medyascope.tv uses a crowdfunding platform called Patreon. This is an online platform that enables people to support creators in a monthly-paid subscription system. Subscribers are called ‘patrons’ and they decide how much money they want to grant. Currently, there are more than 2 million active patrons, funding more than 100.000 active projects in the system (Patreon n.d.).

It is possible to see the amount of money that Medyascope.tv collects from Patreon, since their income is transparent on their Patreon page (Patreon n.d.). Medyascope.tv has 615 patrons who grant 3.919$ per month as of June 2019. For a realistic calculation: 3.919$ corresponds to nearly 22.500 Turkish Lira (TL) with current exchange rate. This amount equals fourteen times the minimum wage for 2018, which was around 1.600 TL (240 Euros) per month.

On its website, Medyascope.tv has an explanation with photos of how people can support them by using Patreon. They also provide a detailed text description of all their videos on YouTube. Medyascope.tv also accepts support by Bitcoin, but there is no further information about whether they ever get payment in the form of cryptocurrency.

Cakir (2018)  states that Medyascope.tv gets equipment donations from its supporters. While showing a progressive line in terms of the amount of content created, as well as studio activities and rising numbers of paid employees, Cakir explains that the funding barely covers the costs. A recent report from Reuters Institute confirms his statement. The report mentions Medyascope.tv as one of the digital outlets that operates freely. But it also points at the fact that these digital outlets do not constitute a sustainable model and “cannot afford to employ full-time experienced reporters for investigative journalism” (Yanatma 2018, 108).

Problem of Exposure

The biggest problem of Medyascope.tv - in accordance with every other media outlet that does not broadcast state propaganda in Turkey - remains the financial one, as they cannot get advertisement money, due to the government's political pressure on company executives. Cakir (2018) states that although they want to extend the range of broadcasts, such as weekend and morning programs, this financial weakness results in the inability to make these kinds of extensions.

But Cakir (2018) also underlines that Medyascope.tv financially proceeded well over the years since the working conditions eventually changed from voluntary to paid employment. Another main problem of Medyascope.tv is exposure. Although the number of subscribers rise regularly, they are still low for a country of more than 80 million people, with nearly 10 million university graduates (TUIK 2018) and an Internet penetration rate above 70% (Yanatma 2018, 109)

Elections and Beyond

On the bright side, Medyascope.tv's advancement is in accordance with Turkey's democracy struggle in the recent elections period. Since 20th of February 2019, supporters of Medyascope on Patreon have risen by 44% and the funds grew by 42% (425 patrons and 2.750$ of income by then). During this period Medyascope.tv broadcasted a program, specially prepared for the elections called 'Acilan Sandik'. It has been coordinated by Irfan Bozan (2019), and includes periodical analyses for the upcoming elections as well as field interviews with candidates and voters in 50 different cities, conducted by 36 reporters of Medyascope.tv in the 86 days before the elections of 31st of March, 2019. These were also continued during the re-elections campaign before 23th of June.

Medyascope.tv

One of the most viewed content before the 31st of March elections was a broadcast by Rusen Cakir (2019), named as "The Calmness of Ekrem Imamoglu" which is viewed by nearly 182.000 people on Cakir's personal Youtube channel as well with some 65.000 viewers on Medyascope.tv's primary Youtube account. In this broadcast, Cakir points out the resemblances between the current media blackout against Ekrem Imamoglu and the media blackout against Recep Tayyip Erdogan 25 years ago. Cakir constantely emphasized the importance of ‘calmness’ in various broadcast activities, which evidently seems to be one of the major factors in winning Istanbul elections for Imamoglu.

While the income of Medyascope.tv remains insufficient for employing experienced investigative journalists, it is also possible that this circumstance might carry a positive impact as it protects the organization from outside influence and enables the creation of its own intellectual tradition in long term basis.

There are many experienced interviewees that join the broadcasts of Medyascope.tv either from the studio or online by using Microsoft’s application Skype. Karadag (2017, 91) claims that the interviewees of Medyascope.tv are generally the people who “usually do not find a place in mainstream media”. However, it should be underlined that this invisibility does not originate from those people’s personal merit. Rather, most of the people that give interviews to Medyascope.tv (or join the debate program as guest commentators) can be considered public intellectuals, who definitely were visible in the mainstream media before the authoritarian shift in state politics.

In this sense, Medyascope.tv covers a very important ground for the people who cannot share anymore their opinion on mainstream media as well as for the people that try to reach those ideas. Even if its exposure is still limited with a specific audience, the medium contributes to the shaping of Turkey's alternative public sphere.

References

Bozan, Irfan. 2019. Yerel Secim Ozel Yayin-1 31 Mart 2019 19:00. 31 03. Accesed 06 2019, 27. https://youtu.be/fo-dl5EXc9U.

Cakir, Rusen, interview by IPI. 2016. IPI Q&A with Rusen Cakir of Turkey's Medyascope.tv (01 03). Accessed 06 27, 2019. https://ipi.media/ipi-qa-with-rusen-cakir-of-turkeysmedyascope-tv/.

Cakir, Rusen, Isin Elicin, and Tamer Durak. 2018. Medyascope 3 Yasinda. Istanbul, 17 08. Accessed 06 2019, 27. https://youtu.be/isV2qlIn3mA.

Cakir, Rusen. 2019. Ekrem Imamoglu Sakinligi, Istanbul, 20 03. Accesed 06 2019, 27. https://youtu.be/Hs8R-eyFrqY

Council of Europe. 2019. Democracy at Risk: Threats and Attacks Against Media Freedom in Europe. Council of Europe.

Karadag, Gokmen Hakan. 2017. “Reporting and Interviewing Styles of Professional and Citizen Reporters on Periscope.” Edited by Ozden Cankaya, Hulya Yengin and Deniz Yengin. Communication and Technology Congress. Bologna: Editografica. 88 - 104. doi:10.7456/ctc_2017_07.

Karlidag, Serpil, and Selda Bulut. 2019. “New Media Income Sources and Digital Media in Turkey: Business Models, Issues and Suggestions.” Erciyes İletisim Dergisi, January: 555 - 572.

Medyascope.tv. n.d. “Kunye.” Medyascope.tv. Accessed 06 27, 2019. https://medyascope.tv/kunye/.

Patreon. n.d. “About.” Patreon. Accessed 06 27, 2019. https://www.patreon.com/about.

—. n.d. “Medyascope.tv.” Patreon. Accessed 06 27, 2019. https://www.patreon.com/medyascopetv.

TUIK. 2018. Population by Attained Education Level and Sex, 2008-2018. Turkish Statistical Institute. Accessed 08 20,2019. http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1018.

Yanatma, Servet. 2018. Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 108 - 109