Media of the Ottoman Empire
The first newspapers in the Ottoman Empire were owned by foreigners living there who wanted to make propaganda about the Western world.
[2] Its main purpose was to convey information about the politics of Post-Revolutionary France to foreigners living in Istanbul; therefore, it had little impact on local population.
In 1828, Khedive of Egypt Muhammad Ali ordered, as part of the drastic reforms he was implementing in the province,[a] the local establishment of the gazette Vekayi-i Misriye (Egyptian Affairs), written in Ottoman Turkish in one column with an Arabic translation in a second column (Ottoman Turkish text was in the right one and Arabic text in the left one).
A few months later, a firman of the sultan ordered that a Turkish gazette be published under the named "Takvim-i Vekayi" (Calendar of Affairs), which would be effectively translating the Moniteur ottoman, and issued irregularly until November 4, 1922.
The first non-official Turkish newspaper, Ceride-i Havadis (Register of Events), was published by an Englishman, William Churchill, in 1840.
The first private newspaper to be published by Turkish journalists, Tercüman-ı Ahvâl (Ottoman Turkish: Interpreter of Events), was founded by İbrahim Şinasi and Agah Efendi and issued in October 1860; the owners stated that "freedom of expression is a part of human nature", thereby initiating an era of free press as inspired by the ideals of 18th century French Enlightenment.
[6] In the meantime, the first private newspaper written solely in Arabic, Mir'at al-ahwal, had been founded by a Syrian poet, Rizqallah Hassun, in 1855, but it had been suspended a year later by Ottoman authorities because of its critical tone regarding their policies.
A new press code inspired by French law, Matbuat Nizamnamesi, was issued in 1864, accompanied by the establishment of a censorship office.
[6] When Sultan Abdulhamid II revoked the constitution, Ottomans established newspapers based in foreign countries as they felt they could no longer operate freely in the empire.
Evangelina Baltia and Ayșe Kavak, authors of "Publisher of the newspaper Konstantinoupolis for half a century," wrote that they could find no information explaining why Nicolaides' proposal was turned down.
There was a Persian-language paper, Akhtar ("The Star"), which was established in 1876 and published Persian versions of Ottoman government documents, including the 1876 Constitution.
[10] The cities of Constantinople (Istanbul), Beirut, Salonika (Thessaloniki), and Smyrna (İzmir) had domestically-published French-language newspapers.
[31] Lorans Tanatar Baruh of SALT and Sara Yontan Musnik of the National Library of France stated that the post-1918 Ottoman government favored the French-language media.
