Medyakronik

» see medyakronik.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The front page of medyakronik.com is dated 29 Nisan 2002 and stayed dated 29 Nisan 2002 for the next six years. Under that date sits a hand-lettered graphic reading Medyakronik kapandı, Medyakronik has closed, and below it one more line: you can still use Medyakronik's two-year archive. Hoşça kalın. Every capture from May 2002 through 2008 returns the same 2.4 kilobyte file. Before that the captures are eight to twelve kilobytes and change every single time, because the site was publishing every single day.

It opened in May 2000 as a daily independent media criticism site, which was a category Turkey did not really have. The routine was clerical. Every national daily got read between morning and noon, the reporting got compared against itself and against the wire it came from, and the writeups went up the same afternoon. Not commentary about the press in general. Specific stories, named, with the error shown.

Kürşat Bumin and Alper Görmüş ran it, with Ümit Kıvanç, and the three of them wrote most of what appeared. İstanbul Bilgi University provided the hosting and the institutional cover. The site's own meta description said İstanbul Bilgi University, which turned out to matter later.

In 2000 I was sixteen and dialing in over a 33.6k modem, and what the Turkish web meant to me then was forums and downloads. A site that read the newspapers for you was aimed at adults who already bought the newspapers. I was not that reader in 2002. What I can say is that nothing on the Turkish web I did use was doing anything like this, and nothing replaced it for years afterward.

~ the dossier ~

~ the method ~

The site had a section called haber karşılaştırma, news comparison, where the same event as printed in four papers sat side by side, and one called sizden gelenler for reader corrections. The April 2001 front page carries a good example of both working together. Milliyet had run a story about a fatal road accident in Kenya under the headline that the victims became crocodile food. A reader wrote in to point out that the animal in the photograph was a hippopotamus and that hippos eat fresh grass. The letter went on, for completeness, to note that the rivers were in flood at that point in the season and the crocodiles were not hunting there anyway.

That is the whole method in one item. Nobody had to argue about press freedom in the abstract. Somebody just read the story closely enough to notice the animal was wrong, and the site printed it under the paper's own headline. The columnist roster around it was serious, with Ragıp Duran writing on global media and Yasemin Baydar on the ombudsman beat, alongside Haluk Şahin and Tanıl Bora.

~ the pressure ~

The interesting part of the death is that it did not come through the site. According to bianet's account, written by Kıvanç after the fact, Medyakronik closed as the result of a campaign run by a large media group, with Fatih Altaylı and Ertuğrul Özkök of Hürriyet named as the people who led it. The campaign was aimed at Bilgi University, not at the three editors. The people running the site concluded that continuing would damage the school and decided to close it themselves.

No court order exists and no takedown was ever served. A media group applied pressure to a university and the university's hosted project stopped publishing. This is a shape worth writing down because it recurs, and because it leaves no record anywhere except in the account of the people it happened to.

~ what stayed frozen ~

İletişim Yayınları published a book of the site's material under the Medyakronik title, so the criticism survives in print even though the site did not. Bumin carried the work into Yeni Şafak with Görmüş under the heading Kronik Medya. Haysiyet.com, which was already linked in Medyakronik's own navigation, kept publishing media criticism after the closure.

The goodbye page had promised the two-year archive would stay readable, and for about six years it did. Then the hosting changed hands and it went. The domain still resolves today, but what answers is a cPanel default page, the placeholder a server sends when nobody has put anything there. Kürşat Bumin died in November 2018.

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