The Turkish Medias Darkest Hour: How Erdogan Got the Protest Coverage He Wanted Piotr Zalewski Foreign Affairs, June 14, 2013 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139505/piotr-zalewski/the-turkish-medias-darkest-hour Two weeks into the protests that have raged in Istanbul and dozens of other cities across Turkey, a few things have become clear. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose authoritarian style of governance has made him the target of the demonstrators anger, has been weakened but remains popular and fully in charge. Those frustrated with his government's policies, as well as with the opposition's clumsy attempts to provide alternatives, have finally found a voice, if not necessarily a leader. One of the protests most tangible outcomes, however, has been to lay bare the full extent to which Erdogans government has brought the Turkish media to heel. Over the past few years, Turkey has made headlines as the worlds top jailer of journalists. According to Reporters Without Borders, a nongovernmental organization that supports press freedom, 67 journalists currently sit in Turkish prisons. For a country that has cast itself, not altogether mistakenly, as a regional leader and a beacon of democracy in the Middle East and the Muslim world more broadly, that is bad news. The government insists that only a small fraction of the jailed journalists are behind bars for crimes related to their reporting. (Most of the journalists are Kurds accused of links to the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, considered a terrorist group.) Human rights organizations and media watchdogs beg to differ. Of the 67 jailed journalists, a Reporters Without Borders spokesperson said in an email, a minimum of 33 journalists and 2 media assistants have been detained for their reporting. Yet the debate about numbers misses the point. As the last two weeks have shown, Turkeys jailed journalists are only the most visible symptom of a much wider malaise: the cowing of the countrys free press. The protests began on May 28 with a small, peaceful sit-in in Gezi Park, a small patch of trees in central Istanbul that had been slated for demolition. Following a brutal police crackdown, the protests swelled in size, drawing in thousands of students, liberals, leftists, Alevis, trade unions, secularists, and Kurds. Yet even as the scale of the demonstrations became clear, a number of major newspapers buried the story. And on June 1, as mass demonstrations and rioting erupted across dozens of cities, the main news channels buried their necks in the sand. That night, CNN Turk, a leading broadcaster, aired hours of documentaries -- on a 1970s novelist, dolphin training, and penguins. At some point, it cut to a news bulletin. It lasted maybe all of 5 minutes, featured a few sound bytes from ruling party officials, a few shots of the protests, and no word from the demonstrators themselves. Overnight, the penguin became a symbol of all that was wrong with the Turkish press. This is not the first time in recent memory that the media have recoiled under government pressure. A similar clampdown occurred just last month, after a terrorist bombing claimed 52 lives in Reyhanli, a Turkish town near the border with Syria.

2 Similarly, Turkish media faced a gag order in late December 2011, when army pilots, mistaking smugglers for PKK fighters, rained bombs on the Iraqi border and killed 34 civilians. Vilday Ay, a former news anchor at Sky Turk, a TV station, told me she had to sit on the story for hours until foreign news agencies began covering it and officials in Ankara confirmed it. In the wake of the Gezi Park protests, however, the censorship seems to have become too blatant, too offensive to tolerate -- not only for many viewers and readers but also for a number of journalists themselves. Since the beginning of June, thousands of people have picketed the offices of several mainstream news stations. Ever since Haberturk TV aired a lengthy interview in which the editor in chief of the companys newspaper treated Erdogan to a barrage of softballs, crowds of protesters have gathered in front of the stations headquarters. Theyre shouting slogans against the editor in chief, our station, and our newspaper, Ay, now a news editor at Haberturk, told me. She and a number of colleagues, themselves fed up with the stations coverage, couldn't be happier: Were clapping, were waving to them from the windows. It's so funny. Theyre protesting us, but we are part of the protest. The crisis of the free press isnt as simple as direct censorship or a chasm between pro- and anti-government media (although a number of outlets have been taken over by businessmen with close ties to the ruling Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym, AKP). The real problem in Turkey is that all mainstream media, sympathetic to the AKP or not, have little choice but to be on good terms with the powers that be. This is as true now as it was when the AKP wasnt around, and when it was the once omnipotent army -- which managed to bring down four governments since 1960 and which Erdogans government has since brought to heel -- that ruled from the sidelines. Today, however, it is more visible than ever before.