This week in our AP government class we are learning about the media, so this blog is accordingly going to have a focus on the media. And government, because it's a government class.
This blog also has a focus on a mysterious death. What I am referring to is the recent discovery of Jacqueline Anne Sutton, who was found dead in a bathroom stall of the Ataturk Airport in Turkey. Jacky Sutton, an English woman who worked for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting as the Iraq country director. She was on her way there to Iraq on October 17, but for reasons still unknown she got no further than Turkey.
Aside from her friends and colleagues comments that Sutton was very confident and she did not seem to be in a suicidal state, all the evidence that the Turkish Agency revealed demonstrated that she was alone and there was no foul play involved.
CNN author Tim Hume wrote two articles on this event- the first documented many examples of how the family and friends of Sutton could not believe she had taken her life. It also cast some doubt on the validity and truth in the Turkish investigation, including that the Turkish authorities would not give the reporters a comment.
The very same day Hume released a second article on the topic stating that the family were now satisfied with the Turkish investigation, and although they would conduct their own private investigation, they no longer believed any foul play could have been involved.
What stands out to me here is the public's perception of the media. It is significant to note that the peers of Jacky Sutton were quick to doubt and discredit the information released by the Turkish authorities. Although the majority of these people were from England (one example used in the article was an Australian organization), I think their response was similar to what it would have been in the United States, with maybe a lesser amount of aggression in the approach. It is very natural to people in societies like ours to question the media and it's accuracy. This perhaps follows the amount of freedom of the press a country can boast.
In the Freedom House Global Press Freedom Rankings from 2013 (https://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/Global%20and%20regional%20tables.pdf) the U.S. and the U.K. both ranked relatively high on the list- 26th and 34th, respectively. Compare this to to Turkey, for example (ranked 126th). The correlation may follow that if a country has more freedom of the press to report how they so choose, it also fosters a sense of distrust when regarding reporters.
After looking at the evidence the Turkish authorities provided, Sutton's family concluded that she acted alone, but not before many colleagues had plastered over social media that they "did not believe for 1 minute" that Sutton might have taken her own life.
According to Freedom House, Turkey is a country that is 'partly free' (The U.S. and U.K. are both rated 'free'). This would indicate that perhaps Turkish reporters do not have access to freely use information as in 'free' countries, and that the government may have a much stronger control over what is published than in the United States. In the example of this event, Turkish officials withheld any comments, something that overall I feel the U.S. would not be so quick to do. Just as Sutton's companions quickly jumped to the conclusion that the Turkish government was hiding something after not releasing a comment to CNN (and I will admit, I jumped to that conclusion right along with them) it was later revealed that the Turkish authorities had done nothing wrong in the least. They simply chose to be a bit more particular with whom they disclosed information.
In short, the 'diarrhea of the mouth' (note: a graphic though effective dysphemism I did not come up with) that the press and our government seem to have contracted when it comes to media has led the public to be very distrusting. It has also led us to employ a whole new form of media, social media, to air out our doubts.
To see the articles mentioned above, click here:
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/20/europe/turkey-death-jacky-sutton/index.html
or here:
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/21/middleeast/turkey-jacky-sutton-family/index.html
