A Word Is Worth 1000 Pictures

There's something mildly appalling about the newspapers of some of the countries I've visited. Not all, but many. Spain's was good, especially El Pais-those one euro weekly Spanish classic from the likes of Miguel de Unamuno or Lorca made a loyal reader out of me-and even Mexico's little papers weren't all that bad at conveying important information with a minimum in frills. But two nations stick in my mind as having the worst: Costa Rica and Turkey.

I'll be the first to admit that I love pictures. I'll draw them, stare at them, sometimes even cut them out and hang them on my mostly bare, white walls. But when they are so large and domineering that they micrify the actual newspaper text, that's when I begin to find them intolerable. The photos of these bogus newspapers aren't boring, that's for sure. Well, not at first. The cleavage of a female ass barely shrouded in an elastic string is what it is, and I'll gawk at it for just as long as the next guy. But when the center page of a country's most popular newspaper features 36 passport size photos of that very subject (as I saw in Costa Rica), not only does the aesthetic beauty of a shapely female butt lose its novelty, but it just wastes paper. At some juncture, you've got to ask yourself, are people really buying this boring shit every day?

Turkish newspapers are especially good at underestimating its readership's ability to synthesize ideas found in a lengthy text. The transmitting of information is largely left up to blocky graphics and cutouts of the human subjects the articles are about, creating the impression, for example, that a smiling, waving 50-foot Erdogan (Turkey's PM) from one article has unwittingly wondered beyond his boundaries and is about to trip over a pie chart and impale himself on a Dubai cityscape from another article. I wonder why Aydin Dogan, Turkey's biggest media baron, doesn't just fire the journalists, chuck all of the text, and turn his papers into veritable picture books with screaming headlines.

Sabah, which means morning, is Turkey's most popular legitimate newspaper (I use the word legitimate loosely) but it is by far the worst (can someone say correlation?). A typical front page might feature a combination of any of the following photos: the red, sweat-drenched face of a drunken celebrity; a surly looking Turkish soldier leaning on his gun (yes, the entire barrel is included); a prominent politician caught making a silly face; a mountainous pair of breasts crammed together in a skimpy, black braw like two jelly fish stuffed in a glass jar (I can't be overly indignant about that one, though).

On any given day, the front page of Sabah will feature no less than two large visual aids per story. A maximum, and I am not one known for hyperbole, of two small paragraphs can be found wedged between the photos. Take, for example, a story about the incursion of Turkish ground troops into Northern Iraq: an adulatory photo of a line of soldiers lying in snow, clad in white; another 50-foot Erdogan looking very, very severe; a bar graph showing the monthly increase of Turkish troops at the Iraq border. Oh, wait! I almost forgot about the text! Let's see...PKK, USA, terrorists are evil, everyone is pissed, got a little snippet of a quote from the PM. Next story!

Tonight I bought a copy of Sabah to see exactly what is the proportion of space occupied by graphics to space occupied by non-headline text. I focused my study on the front page and I found that in a total area of 2,128 square/cm, only 259 square/cm of space was occupied by non-headline text. One article about Talibani's recent visit to Turkey, a relatively historical event, received a scant 86 words. The continuation of the article on page 21 was a meager 100 words more. Granted the front page should be an eye popper, and the health and dating sections are nowhere near as skimpy. But the articles still lag far behind what you'd expect from, say, a U.S. News, let alone a NY Times.

The whole thing got me thinking: are Turks really that averse to reading, or does Turkish media, and the politicos who dictate to it much of what is reported, simply refuse to deign to thoroughly inform them? Or perhaps there is really no clue among the media as to what makes for good reportage. I, for one, believe that if you gave Turks a Turkish equivalent of the NY Times, they would eat it up. I mean, they would just tear through every political article, memorize the facts, and then go argue the thing with each other in the local tea house. They'd be like an under-nourished child who suddenly finds a plate of hot beans and soft bread sitting beneath his nose. I think the people are looking for substance, and the only way to fight the conspiracy theories, for example, that run rampant here is to provide not only accurate information, but enough of it! Maybe at some point it will change. For now I'll keep my newspapers in the bathroom in case I run out of toilet paper.