Filtering in journalism is done in order to fix the language problems in an article. Contrarily to censorship it doesn’t change the main idea of the article or the argue of the writer. Therefore language filtering in journalism is not censorhip and it is a very important process for any of the media establishments to prevent a possible conflict or the spread of an asymmetric information to the public.
Nearly everyday all the written articles are going through the filtering process and when it is not done proparly, it may cause bad things. For example, last month Oktay Ekşi had to resign from his job because he ended one of his articles by saying “ You see the ‘merits’ of that mentality that even sells its own mothers.” which was a very disputed sentence that did not had a backup behind it. It is told that he didn’t want his article to be filtered by the editor and if it was filtered he was still going to be a column writer in Hürriyet.
Today, under the name of “filtering” media establishments which are a follower of the government are doing censorhip. Most of these establishments are either scared from the government or that are a follower of the government and therefore they are not telling the truths of the govnerment. In other words they are being “loyal” to the government. To illustrate we can talk about the stance of the media after the military revolution on the 12th of September, 1980 in Turkey. In those days media was manipulated by the military, for instance, Kenan Evren, who was the head of this revolution was making changes in the constitution by a referandum. People who were against this change were going to vote “blue” and people who were supporting this change were going to vote “white” and Kenan Evren was censoring the articles that simply told people to vote “blue” in the newspapers. Moreover, the film sector was affected by the revolution because lots of films were banned due to the strict executive. Furthermore, some writers were becoming “loyal” and they were telling that the revolution has changed the future of Turkey and it helped Turkey to build a strong government. Recently there was a crisis which destroyed the whole censoring structure in the world. Wikileaks crisis is spreding approved information about the truths of the governments to the whole world. This crisis is changing and is going to change too many things in the future.
In conclusion, normally filtering is not a way of censorship but it actually depends on the way of using it. When it is used in order to change the main idea of the topic, which is censorhip, and preventing the spred of the truths of the governments we can call this a censorhip and this is a very wrong thing. Lastly, as I stated before, filtering is a very important process and it should not be used for being “loyal”.
