Mine Gencel Bek

Mine Gencel Bek is a professor at the Department of Journalism, Faculty of Communication, Ankara University. She completed her Ph.D. at Loughborough University in 1999 with the thesis Communicating Capitalism: A Study of the Contemporary Turkish Press. This analysis included the structural elements of the changing industry, news as texts, and the role of journalists in the news-production process. For that thesis, she conducted interviews with journalists and editors and investigated the news production process. Her publications have a wide range of issues: the political economy of Turkish media; the media policies in the European Union and Turkey; media professionals and textual analysis of news in press and TV on the issues such as tabloidization and representation of women and children. Common to all of her work is criticism of unethical practices of irresponsible media and the call for the democratization of societies for freedom and equality, and the democratization of the media, with a special focus on journalism. Her current research is on the comparative media systems, journalism practices, and technological innovations.