Mithat Bereket

Mithat Bereket — Biography

Mithat Bereket was born on October 10, 1966, in Ankara. After TED Ankara College, he graduated in International Relations from Ankara University's Faculty of Political Sciences; a basketball player through his university years who rose to the Turkish national team, he went on to earn a master's degree at Lancaster University in England with a thesis on Cyprus, and pursued doctoral research there on radical Islam. He later lectured at Kadir Has University's Faculty of Communications and helped establish its Pusula Academy, while building a reputation as a war correspondent who reported from conflict zones including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Halabja, Kosovo and Palestine.

From 1995 he hosted his own program, Pusula, which aired on Kanal D, Star TV, NTV and, from 2008, TRT1; he also presented a radio program, "Sesli Gazete," on Best FM for seven years, and anchored coverage of major events such as Bill Clinton's visit to Turkey, the OSCE summit in Istanbul, and the September 11 attacks. Over his career he conducted exclusive interviews with figures including Nelson Mandela, Benazir Bhutto, Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi, Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu, and in 2015 received a U.S. award for outstanding media leaders. Balance, gait and speech problems caused by burnout syndrome led him to leave journalism in 2019; in 2024 he received the Mülkiyeliler Birliği's Vefik Kitapçıgil Public Service Award.