Turkey's War on the Press

By ASLI AYDINTASBAS

Istanbul

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.

Ms. Aydintasbas is a columnist for the Aksam newspaper.