No TV to watch the news

Now and then I invite a Turkish journalist to write a guest blog post on my site. This guest blog is written by Turkish-Dutch Zehra Kaya. Zehra is a student at the Journalism Academy in the Dutch city of Utrecht and is currently studying for one semester at an Istanbul university. During these months, she is my intern. Zehra dreams of becoming a documentary maker in Turkey.

This blog post was written by Zehra Kaya (see boxed text).

I’ve been an exchange student in journalism now for two months at Istanbuls Yeditepe University and am having a good time. What I do miss during my meals, is watching the news. At Journalism Academy in the Dutch city of Utrecht, it’s not even possible to avoid the news. There is a display in the faculty building where news is shown constantly, and in the canteen the public news channel is always turned on.

At Yeditepe university that is totally different. Finding a TV with the news is basically impossible. Even at the faculty of communication and journalism they don’t watch the news..!

The Social Building of the uni has four canteens. They all have several televisions, always showing the famous music channel “Powerturk”. To make sure, I asked at one of the cafeterias whether I could watch the news somewhere at the university, but unfortunately the answer was ‘No’.

The people in the canteen say that everybody wants to see something else. ‘If we turn on the news, somebody will come to ask to switch to a soap. When we turn on the soap, somebody else will come and again ask for another channel. To get rid of this, we just turn on a music channel. That’s the easiest for us’.

To my question if there is also a lack of news at state universities, they had no answer. Yeditepe is a private university. I’m not even surprised that they follow the wishes of the sudents here, since the students at private universities are called ‘clients’. So for now there is no way I can watch the news while chewing my food. I have no choice but to listen to “Tuttu fırlattı kalbimi”…