Turkey is concerned over cuts in Turkish broadcasting in Germany, CNNturk reports. Earlier this year Radyo Multikulti, broadcasting in 17 languages including Turkish, was closed due to financial issues. A German DPA radio station having Turkish broadcasting will also shut down by the end of the year though it launched activities only seven months ago. Another blow to Turkish broadcasting was struck by Cologne-based Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). One-hour Turkish programmes will be replaced by programmes in German ones, and weekly boadcasts in Turkish will be reduced from 10.5 hours to 5.5 hours.
As we previously reported, Bulgarians are also complaining about Turkish news broadcasting. The leader of nationalist “Party of Bulgarian Men”, Rosen Markov, made an attempt at self-immolation opposing news broadcasting in Turkish, near the building of Bulgarian BRT TV channel. Rumour has it that a signature collection has been launched against Turkish broadcasting in Bulgaria.
(Source: News.am)
on Nov 20th, 2009 at 20:57
1/ Who is “Turkey”?
2/ What is a “DPA radio station”? I’m not aware of any radio activities from Deutsche Presse-Agentur, other than their audio news service Rufa.
3/ The planned reduction of Turkish programmes on WDR’s Funkhaus Europa station is related to the elimination of HR’s foreign language services (more widely known as closing down 594 kHz) at yearend. WDR wants to continue the so far HR-produced broadcasts in Greek and Spanish, but no additional funds are available for this purpose, thus they want to make savings on the Turkish broadcasts to make this possible.
on Nov 20th, 2009 at 21:55
I think the DPA reference actually means their news service in Turkish, which has indeed been dropped. It is in the Google cached version of the page
http://www.dpa.de/Text.435.0.html but is no longer on the live page. It was launched earlier this year, according to http://www.topnews.in/deutsche-presseagentur-dpa-start-germanturkish-service-298051
“Turkey” of course means “the Turkish government”. The names of countries are often used in English in place of the long form. If that isn’t clear to non-native speakers I will change relevant items in future.
on Nov 21st, 2009 at 14:00
Aha:
http://www.turi2.de/2009/11/13/heute2-dpa-stellt-tuerkischen-dienst-neun-monaten-7364748/
They say they got too little customers, thus the service was not economical. Here it must be considered that DPA never publishes text products on their own but offers them to publishing houses, broadcasting organizations and the like only, unlike other news agencies like Reuters (own online service) or AFP and AP (publication via Google).
The whole story got almost no attention here in Germany, also due to another big DPA story: They will move their headquarters into the buildings of the publishing house Axel Springer. This prompted the Tagesspiegel newspaper to drop their subscription of DPA, saying that they consider DPA’s editorial independence as not ensured anymore:
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/medien-news/art15532,2943443
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/medien-news/art15532,2943701
And the practice to refer to governments as “Turkey” or, especially worse, “the Turks” etc. is known in German as well. But still it is rather unsatisfactory, because it suggests that these are homogeneous bodies where everybody has the same opinion. In my humble opinion such sweeping generalizations are just too much of a simplification. There are already too much stereotypes around.