Corruption and Self-Censorship in Turkish Journalism by Yavuz Baydar Joan Shorenstein Fellow, Fall 2014
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Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy Discussion Paper Series #D-91, February 2015 The Newsroom as an Open Air Prison: Corruption and Self-Censorship in Turkish Journalism by Yavuz Baydar Joan Shorenstein Fellow, Fall 2014 Columnist, blogger, co-founder of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Table of Contents Discussion Paper ............................................................................................................................. 3 Appendix I: Incidents of pressure on journalists by Erdoğan and the AKP ............................... 26 Appendix II: History of the struggle of Turkish journalists against oppression ......................... 73 Appendix III: Government oppression of the media ................................................................... 94 Appendix IV: Media and threats to Turkey’s emerging democracy .......................................... 118 Endnotes ...................................................................................................................................... 129 2 Discussion Paper Foreword Freedom of expression in Turkey is, sadly, in a very bad state. What can I say other than that it has hit a new low? A lot of friends tell me, “He and she are fired from this or that newspaper.” I have never seen any country where so many journalists are being fired...even the journalists who are closest to the government. That’s the first point. Second, and this is the worst, there is fear. Everybody is frightened, I can see that. People want to say some things, but fear being fired. This is not normal. The pressure makes those who speak boldly more important. Courage comes to the fore, rather than creative thinking. Respected institutions in the world like Freedom House have been saying this, but let me also say: Freedom of expression in Turkey has hit a new low. Orhan Pamuk, Turkish novelist, 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, December, 2014 3 2014 – The Annus Horribilis of Turkish Media The year 2014 will go down as the annus horribilis of Turkish journalism. It began in the wake of two police operations in the last days of December 2013, massive graft probes into the affairs of four ministers of the majority Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. Those touched by the scandals included a number of businessmen with close connections to the government, bureaucrats and bank managers, but also Bilal Erdoğan, the son of then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Of even greater concern is that the investigations appeared to suggest that senior government figures were engaged in sanctions-busting against Iran, and that these senior figures had links to financiers who laundered funds for al Qaeda. The files compiled by law enforcement and prosecutors were a burning fuse: They claimed to expose a vast network of organized crime, with evidence of bribery, abuse of power and widespread corruption at the very highest echelons of power. Corruption of the nation’s media was at the very heart of these allegations. A critical part of the probe – backed by legal wiretappings – concerned consortia to co-finance media entirely in favor of the AKP government. This joint effort, in which businessmen benefitting from government contracts paid into a common slush-fund, gave rise to the term “pool media.” The appendices to this study go into great detail in presenting chapter and verse documentation of how the Turkish media has fallen into the malaise of self- censorship and complicity with government interference. In that sense they are germane to this introductory essay, which tries to establish the background of why this has happened. It describes the traumatic background of the situation and how a crippled media now face a historic test. This is no less a matter than of restoring credibility to institutions that have been subjected to years of political pressure and which have worked to undermine their own public interest function. 4 A turning point in this process was the parliamentary elections of 2011 – which led to a sweeping victory for AKP – and became a license to accrue yet more power and silence the opposition. Yet another landmark was the blackout implemented by the media itself on the story about 34 Kurdish villagers bombed to death in the Iraqi border village of Uludere/Roboski by Turkish fighter jets in late 2011. That silence became a dress rehearsal for the media surrendering its role as the watchdog of the public interest as the Fourth Estate. Yet if alarm for the independence of the Turkish press was already high, concern reached code level orange soon after the outbreak of the summer 2013 demonstrations to protect Istanbul’s Gezi Park. Protests spread to 78 of the 81 provinces in Turkey. The degree of self-censorship became so intense that the mainstream Turkish media itself became the subject of demonstration and open ridicule. Undeterred, Erdoğan declared that critical media – domestic and international – was part of a conspiracy to topple him and his government from power. After that, the demonization of independent journalism continued full throttle, with predictably dire consequences. The government attempted to criminalize reporting and commentary contrary to its own interest, in effect normalizing a form of an “emergency rule.” Journalists who tried to resist, defend their independence and professional dignity, or defy the pressure to relinquish their integrity started to be arbitrarily fired or dispatched to professional limbo. Some of them, in despair, found jobs in partisan media. Others have been seeking new channels online to continue to fight for the survival of their profession. The graft probe was, undoubtedly, the story the press needed to investigate and the one the public needed to hear. But after faltering on coverage during the Uludere/Roboski bombing and Gezi Protests, Turkish media entered into what can be described as mass-paralysis. Mighty media owners in the center realized with horror that even minimally critical coverage of corruption would mean severe consequences for their large-scale business interests. As a result, the 5 developing story of high-level corruption, a dream for any decent journalist anywhere in the world, was declared by the news management to be an area surrounded by “barbed wire.” While the staunchly loyal pro-government media declared the legal probes to be yet another coup attempt, frightened media owners of the traditional center were keen to increase the pressure on their newsrooms, to ensure that “stories of public interest are not leaked to the public.” Thus, 2014 began with a self-censorship more institutionalized and internalized than ever before. Media owners took their lesson from Uludere/Roboski and the Gezi Protests: the bulk of the Turkish population got their news from television and this was where self-censorship mattered the most. Only a few channels, often partisan in their opposition to the government and with scarce resources, even began to cover the story. Blocked by political and institutional pressure, Turkey's core of dedicated and defiant journalists practiced their craft online, more intensely than before. Social media and independent news sites began to fill the vacuum. When the details of the graft probes began to leak onto the Internet, the government's reaction was to shut down YouTube and Twitter. However, this proved to be technically difficult and in the end legally unsuccessful. Yet Erdoğan was undeterred, and the AKP government continues; the Internet remains a target and vulnerable to government interference. Turkish journalists' battle for freedom, independence and even constitutional rights have been met with a series of defeats. Apart from the systemic purge in the media industry, between 2013 until the end of 2014, the government imposed over twenty news blackouts on important stories, on various grounds including national security. This was a normalization of censorship. Intimidation of journalists followed on a daily basis. An opposition source told the media that the number of journalists prosecuted by Erdoğan on grounds of “defamation” was 110 in the past 10 years. 2014 ended the same way it began: Almost on the anniversary of the two graft probes, on December 14, 2014, two of the remaining critical media outlets – 6 Zaman and STV – were raided and their top managers arrested. These two outlets are connected to the Gülen Movement, which is affiliated with Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish cleric – based in Pennsylvania, U.S. – who preaches a globalist, science- based, tolerant “social Islam.” Erdoğan, keen on conspiracies against his power, sees the Gülen Movement as responsible for the graft probes, but so far has been unable to come up with credible proof of a plot. Ekrem Dumanlı, the editor-in-chief of Zaman, who was briefly under arrest after the raid on December 14, said that when he asked the judge if the reason he was arrested was for some articles he wrote, the judge's response was, “yes.” The final incident of 2014, at the end of December, symbolized comprehensively the perilous state of media freedom: Journalist Sedef Kabaş was charged with up to five years of imprisonment, because of a single tweet she wrote that was critical of a court decision. Imprisonment Declines – but Freedom is Not Increasing The current state of Turkish journalism, grave by international standards, has consequences both domestically and internationally. At its most basic, the weaker Turkish