Ethical debates in the field of journalism and ombudsman system: The case of Turkey

In Turkey, the economy began to apply neoliberal policies in the 1980s. Thus, structural transformations occurred in the field of journalism. Newspapers were organized as commercial enterprises, dependence on advertisements increased, and monopolization trends occurred in the field of journalism. As the economic capital required for entry into the journalism field increased, the intervention of the political field in the field of journalism became easier. The fact that the field of journalism, which is expected to be an autonomous area, has become dependent on the economic and political fields has deepened the "independence" crisis of the journalism field. The transformations in the field of journalism at the end of the 1990s, the decrease in trust in newspapers and journalists and the loss of reputation of the journalism profession have increased their search for self-control in the field of journalism. The purpose of self-regulation practices is to establish a self-regulation mechanism independent of state control and capital owners, and to ensure journalism in accordance with journalistic professional ethics. One of the self-regulation mechanisms implemented for this purpose is ombudsman. Different names such as reader editor, reader representative, reader advocate can be used for ombudsman practice in journalism. In Turkey, this practice is commonly referred to as reader representatives. In the field of journalism in Turkey, a self-regulatory mechanism that reads the representative application for the first time applied in the daily Milliyet in 1999, it has become widespread in years. The aim of this study is to examine the readers' experiences as to what kind of application the readership representative finds trying to institutionalize as an autonomous sub-field within the field of journalism. The aim of this research is to discuss both the dependency of the field of journalism with a heterogeneous quality to other fields and the problems faced by the readers' representatives. For this purpose, interviews were made with the representatives of the readers who were the representatives of Milliyet, Hürriyet, Sabah, and Cumhuriyet, and these interviews were evaluated in accordance with the purpose of the research. Keywords: journalism, ombudsman, reader representative, Bourdieu