Sounds like somebody who works in business development at IST knows the likely audience of a publication, and wants to target their message to those people. When negotiating in business, one begins with a silly price and gradually move towards something more realistic - same in this case with saying one hopes for 4 airports to be linked to IST when one expects to get no more than 2 any time soon. It seems wishful thinking to expect SOU has a route to Turkey before either Bristol or Newcastle - so there will be a number of years to wait.
Had it been (e.g.) a French website doing the interview, I imagine the talk would have been of a very different set of routes.