Medya Etiği Eğitiminde Karşılaşılan Sorunlar: Türkiye’deki Ders İzlenceleri Üzerinden Bir Değerlendirme
Bülent Çaplı, Oğuzhan TaşBu çalışmada, Türkiye’deki iletişim eğitimi veren fakülte ya da bölümlerde nasıl bir medya etiği eğitimi verildiği ilgili derslerin izlenceleri üzerinden incelenmiştir. Türkiye’de 1990’lardan bugüne medya endüstrisinde büyük bir yapısal dönüşüm gerçekleşmiş, eşzamanlı olarak iletişim fakültelerinin sayısında dramatik bir artış görülmüştür. Tüm bu değişimlere karşılık, etik eğitimine yönelik müfredatın yeniden düşünülüp planlanmasında dikkat çekici bir çaba görülmemiştir. Fakültelerin meslek eğitimini öncelemesi ve müfredatlarını bu çerçevede geliştirmesi karşısında, medyanın demokratik bir siyasal sistemde üstlenmesi gereken role dair bakış açıları geri planda kalmış, piyasanın zorlayıcı gerçekliği daha çok vurgulanır olmuştur. Bugün Türkiye medyası mülkiyet yoğunlaşması ve aşırı politizasyonun ikiz baskısı altındadır. Medya kuruluşlarını ve habercileri baskı altında tutmak ve denetlemek için kullanılan yöntemler nedeniyle Türkiye’nin basın özgürlüğü karnesi giderek kötüleşmektedir. Geleceğin medya çalışanlarını yetiştiren iletişim fakültelerinin medya etiğini nasıl bir çerçevede “gördükleri” bu koşullarda bize daha da önemli görünmektedir. Bu nedenle, Türkiye’de medya etiği eğitiminin nasıl bir görünüme sahip olduğunu fakülte ve bölümlerden toplanan ders izlenceleri temelinde incelenmiştir. Ele alınan konu ve sorunlar, ders amaç ve hedefleri, değerlendirme ve öğretim teknikleri gibi başlıca unsurlar ilgili eleştirel literatürle bağlantısı içinde değerlendirilmiştir.
Problems in Media Ethics Education: An Assessment of Syllabi of Undergraduate Courses in Turkey
Bülent Çaplı, Oğuzhan TaşThis study explores the syllabi used at communication faculties/departments in Turkey with the goal of examining how media ethics is taught at the undergraduate level. Since 1990s, we have witnessed fundamental changes in the media landscape and the proliferation of communication faculties in Turkey. Despite these changes, curriculum planning involving ethics has received little attention within communication studies. Faculties have tended to orient themselves too much toward the profession and too little toward the academy. We assume that this trend overemphasizes the realities of the market while ignoring moral reasoning through the role of profession in a democratic political system. Today, the media profession suffers from ownership concentration and politicization. Turkey has a poor record on press freedom mainly because of the methods used by the government to pressure and control media outlets and journalists. Under these circumstances, exploring the ways of seeing ethics in media education seems more crucial to us. To assess the current scenery of media ethics education in Turkey, syllabi of ethics courses from various faculties were collected to be analysed primarily for their subject content, but some other issues were considered as well, such as course descriptions, objectives, assessment techniques, and teaching methods.
There were 54 communication faculties in Turkey between 2016 and 2017, when we collected data for this study. We managed to obtain information from 50 of them (92%). Of those 50, 20 did not have any freestanding ethics courses. Since 12 out of the 20 were been established within the last couple of years, they have not developed their curricula yet, so there is no information on whether they are planning to offer such a course in the future. The remaining eight faculties have recently changed their curricula, replacing freestanding courses with general ethics courses offered to all university students. In addition, 30 of the 50 facilities have a total of 48 freestanding courses offered in 66 different programs. We collected and analyzed 48 syllabi of these courses for this study.
The common components, in descending order of the frequency with which they appear in the syllabi, are listed as follows: Ethics and morality (73%); Self-regulation in the media (44%); Professional ethics (41.5%); Theories of Ethics (33%); New communication technologies/New Media/Internet (31%); Human Rights/Individual Rights/Privacy (31%); Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct (30%); Media Industry/Ownership (30%); The Responsibility of News Media (27%); Ethical Problems of Media in Turkey (27%); Freedom of Information (23%); Reporting Crisis and War (14.5%); Political Communication (14.5%); Discrimination and Hate Speech (14.5%); and Tabloid Journalism (10.5%). It should be noted that the list above provides a composite picture of the components in the 48 syllabi and no one course contains all the components on the list.
On closer scrutiny of the components and topics in the 48 syllabi, there seems to be a fairly consistent pattern, at least in terms of subject matter: how ethics is being taught in the classroom. However, there seems to be a widespread confusion about “how to teach ethics.”
- Some courses are structured according to the academic interests of their instructors (e.g., theories of communication, philosopy, law, and news journalism) instead of being planned for specific qualifications to be earned.
- Concern about covering as many topics as possible leads to overloaded course schedules, which seem quite unsuited to examine any issues in detail.
- Individual approaches in moral theory are considered to be a ready-made package of knowledge that can be dealt within one or two course weeks. As far as we deduced from course schedules, they are generally conveyed in the first few weeks and hardly mentioned again thereafter.
- Journalistic ethics dominates over other moral issues of communication media. Particularly, when one speaks of “practical norms of profession,” it usually refers to the conduct of news journalism. Moral issues regarding television production, drama, or entertainment media are largely ignored. This is striking for a culture of media where a great majority of the audience pays too much attention to television shows.
This study is limited to what is explicitly mentioned in the syllabi. Since syllabi are typically very concise, details are often left out. Therefore, first, the syllabi reviewed in this study were not explicit enough about the content of topics, content of theories, selection of cases for classroom discussions, and assignments to draw any clear conclusions about which standards they exercised. Secondl, this study did not (and in most cases could not) consider the amount of time spent on the topics in each course represented by the syllabi. So, this study gives some evidence for the state of freestanding ethics courses in general. We believe that a survey dealing with instruction content and teaching methods administered to instructors of freestanding ethics courses is necessary to obtain more information about the subject.
