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WSJ: Turkey's War On The Press

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  • WSJ: Turkey's War On The Press

    TURKEY'S WAR ON THE PRESS
    ASLI AYDINTASBAS

    Wall Street Journal
    Sept 17 2009

    Prime Minister Erdogan seeks to stifle media critics.

    About two years ago I was sipping tea in the office on a slow news
    Sunday when I got a call from security: "The police are here. They say
    they are taking over the newspaper." The police? Taking over? I was
    the Ankara bureau chief of Turkey's second-largest daily, Sabah, and
    felt invincible. But within minutes, plainclothes officers filled my
    room, explaining that there was a simultaneous raid at the newspaper's
    headquarters in Istanbul and that from now on the paper would be run
    by the Savings and Deposit Insurance Fund.

    What?

    The paper was indeed run by a government agency and over the course
    of the next six months I, the editor in chief, and some of the
    columnists were sacked or had to leave. (The legal argument for
    the takeover of the Ciner publishing group, which owned Sabah and
    other titles and had 3,000 employees, was that a document was not
    disclosed to the authorities six years previously when the newspaper
    changed hands.) Sabah was subsequently sold to a company where the
    Turkish prime minister's son-in-law is the CEO in a bid subsidized
    by state banks.

    Today, that paper, for which I worked many years as a reporter,
    New York correspondent and, finally, the Ankara bureau chief, has
    an unwavering pro-government line. The Sabah incident was not an
    isolated case, as Turkey's government has pressured and strong-armed
    media barons to create a complain-at-your-own-risk environment.

    It came as no surprise last week when Turkey's largest media group,
    Dogan--a conglomerate of newspapers, magazines and television stations
    including CNN's Turkey affiliate--was slapped with a colossal $2.5
    billion tax fine by inspectors following a public feud with Turkish
    Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

    Turkey's ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP)
    has long been angered by the secular Dogan media's coverage. But
    the showdown came right before the local elections last spring,
    when Mr. Erdogan lashed out at Dogan newspapers for reporting about
    a corruption case involving an Islamic charity close to AKP.

    Mr. Erdogan rallied city to city, calling for a boycott of Dogan
    papers and claiming the group had unfairly linked his party to the
    charity. Since then the rumor has been that Erdogan would finish
    Dogan off. The crippling fine may well do that.

    This isn't outright censorship. But today, thanks to the rise of a new
    conservative business elite promoted by the government and encouraged
    to delve into media, more than half of Turkish papers and television
    stations have turned into loyalist outlets.

    Here are the rules: Language directly attacking the prime minister
    and stories about his immediate family are off limits. Editors in
    secular media outlets think twice before running a story criticizing
    the government for introducing Islam into Turkey's strictly secular
    public domain. One prominent Ankara journalist and a popular hardline
    secularist academic--both of whose opinions I despise but whose
    right to express them I uphold--were jailed in a long-running alleged
    coup-plot case. (They profess their innocence.) Top editors and media
    tycoons complain of widespread wiretaps. Even cartoonists have been
    sued here, with Mr. Erdogan forcing an independent comic paper,
    the Penguin, to pay compensation for depicting him as various animals.

    In the spirit of free expression, Aydin Dogan, the majority shareholder
    of Dogan publishing group, was recently given a list of columnists
    considered hostile by the government, according to a Dogan source--the
    suggestion being that he should fire some in exchange for better
    relations with the government.

    This is not to say Turkey was ever a bastion of free speech. In
    Turkey's tumultuous pre-democratic past there were prosecutions of
    journalists and writers, with antiterror laws placing particular
    restrictions on the Kurdish issue. But mainstream media were somehow
    off the hook. With the advancement toward European Union membership
    over the past decade, Turkey has improved its democratic standards
    significantly--mostly under AKP's reign.

    The Turkish government's relationship with free speech is a complicated
    one, however. Mr. Erdogan is a man who can both spearhead revolutionary
    reforms--like pushing for Kurdish and minority rights and opening the
    border with Turkey's historic enemy Armenia--and rebuke journalists for
    "disrespecting" him. In his avuncular but iron-fisted world of power,
    criticism is managed and media is controlled.

    The tragedy of the Turkish media is that it is largely owned
    by companies that have other businesses interests, making them
    particularly susceptible to political pressure. Neither Mr. Dogan nor
    Turkey's other secular barons are free of blame. They have never made
    freedom of expression a priority. Publishers have danced with power,
    bargained for deals in return for editorial support, and applauded
    each time the government went after their rivals. But soon there may
    be no independent media left.
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