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Türkiye’de Medya Patronları Demokrasinin Altını Oyuyorlar
In Turkey, Media Bosses Are Undermining Democracy
Türkiye’de Medya Patronları Demokrasinin Altını Oyuyorlar.
19 07 2013
ISTANBUL
THE protests that convulsed Istanbul and other Turkish cities
last month exposed, among many other things, the shameful role of Turkey’s media conglomerates in subverting press freedom.
Türkiye’de Medya Patronları Demokrasinin Altını Oyuyorlar
As the social unrest reached a peak on May 31 with clashes between
tear-gas-happy police officers and protesters spreading through the
heart of the city, the lack of even minimal coverage by seemingly
professional private news channels presented the residents of Istanbul’s
upscale neighborhoods near Taksim Square with a moment of truth. They
could see, hear and smell the truth from their windows, and they quickly
realized how their TV channels had lied by omission.
As the city center turned into a battlefield, 24/7 news channels opted to air documentaries about penguins
or to go on with their talk shows. One channel, Haberturk TV, only 200
yards from the now famous Gezi Park, had three medical experts
discussing schizophrenia — an apt metaphor for the state of journalism
in Turkey.
But this is nothing new. For years, it has been politically expedient
for major news outlets to cover up the truth and impose news blackouts
on all serious issues, especially the Kurdish conflict. After an October
2011 meeting between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and media
owners about how to cover “news on terror,” mainstream TV outlets were
cowed and began to exercise excessive editorial caution. When 34 Kurdish
villagers were bombed to death by Turkish fighter jets two months
later, in Uludere, near the Iraqi border, these outlets very efficiently
blocked coverage of the story.
The plague of sanitized media coverage reaches far beyond Turkey. Across
the globe, and especially in young or struggling democracies like
Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, Hungary and
Albania, the lack of media independence is doing real damage. Media
executives who intimidate or censor reporters while kowtowing to
governments to protect their other business interests are undermining
the freedom and independence of the press that is vital to establishing
and consolidating a democratic political culture.
Dirty alliances between governments and media companies and their
handshakes behind closed doors damage journalists’ role as public
watchdogs and prevent them from scrutinizing cronyism and abuses of
power. And those who benefit from a continuation of corrupt practices
also systematically seek to prevent serious investigative journalism.
The problem is simple: one need only follow the money. Turkey’s
mainstream media is owned by moguls who operate in other major sectors
of the economy like telecommunications, banking and construction. Since
only a few large TV channels and newspapers make profits, the
proprietors tend to keep them as bait for the government, which needs
media managers who are submissive to the will of politicians.
It is fertile ground for carrot-and-stick policies. The more willing the
proprietors are, the more their greed is met. Several of Turkey’s media
moguls have been given extensive favors through public-works contracts,
including huge urban construction projects in Istanbul.
It’s not possible to conduct serious journalism in such a polluted
system. These conflicts of interest have transformed Turkey’s major
newsrooms into prisons: coverage of economic corruption in Turkey today
is almost zero. There are a few tiny, brave independent outlets, which
break stories that are critical of the government, but these stories are
hardly ever picked up by the mainstream media and therefore have little
impact.
While the world is focused on the issue of jailed journalists in Turkey —
almost all of whom are Kurds — the kiss of death to our profession has
been bestowed by owners who consciously destroy editorial independence,
fire journalists who voice skepticism and dissent and block
investigative reporting.
Turkey’s rapidly growing economy has caused such greed that the media
owners regularly counteract the judgment of professional journalists who
are trying to do their jobs on behalf of the public. Editorial content
is strictly controlled by media bosses who have other business interests
and are submissive to the government. With, or more often without, any
direct government intervention, they impose self-censorship on a daily
basis and silence colleagues who defend basic journalistic ethics. With
hardly any union presence in these outlets, there is very little job
security.
The daily Milliyet, once a flagship of good journalism, was acquired in
2012 by the Demiroren Group, which, among other ventures, is in the
liquid propane gas business. In February 2013, Milliyet printed the
minutes of talks between Kurdish politicians and the jailed Kurdish
rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan. Two days later, a veteran Milliyet
columnist, Hasan Cemal, boldly defended the
paper’s decision to publish, declaring: “It’s one thing to publish a
newspaper. It’s another to rule the country. The two should not be
mixed. Everyone should mind their own business.” The scoop and the
column infuriated Mr. Erdogan, who publicly condemned the paper and
journalism more broadly. Mr. Cemal was given two weeks of forced leave.
Upon his return, he wrote a new article on media freedom and independence, which was rejected by the paper’s owner, and Mr. Cemal resigned.
At NTV, a news channel targeted by protesters for its poor coverage, a
monthly magazine called NTV Tarih, which focuses exclusively on history,
had a cover story in its July issue about Gezi Park’s past.
The company’s management asked to see the issue’s content a day before
it went to press. Management not only canceled the issue, but also
discontinued publication altogether. NTV Tarih’s circulation had been
35,000, among the most commercially successful periodicals in Turkey.
The owner of the NTV channel, Dogus Group, happens to have recently won a
bid to build the large Galataport — a contract worth over $700 million —
that will transform an old port in the center of Istanbul into a modern
hub of tourism, shopping and real estate.
Another conglomerate, Ciner Group, which owns media outlets like
Haberturk TV, has in the past years won a number of contracts for energy
and electricity distribution. Since then, the increasingly
pro-government editorial policy of Ciner Group outlets has been clearly
visible. Unsurprisingly, Haberturk’s headquarters near Gezi Park became a
target for protesters angry at the channel for broadcasting an obsequious interview with Mr. Erdogan at the height of the police crackdown.
THE Turkish media’s pathological dysfunction is just one example of a
much broader phenomenon. An extensive study conducted for the European
Union by a group of journalists and independent media experts from
across the continent found similar problems throughout southeastern
Europe.
“Many media owners and leading journalists have vested political and
economic interests and use their position to engage in ruthless ‘media
wars’ against political opponents,” the report found.
The only way to prevent the damage done to democracy by a pliant media
is if governments empowered by the electorate reform state broadcasters
so that they become autonomous or independent public services and
prepare the legal ground for fair competition and diversity in privately
owned media outlets. In Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and
Australia such broadcasters are established by law and guarantee the
public’s right to know without interference from commercial interests.
Their organizational structures represent various segments of their
societies and are run by independent professionals, rather than partisan
bureaucrats.
An autonomous public broadcaster that serves as a focal point for good
journalism, far away from commercial concerns and government influence,
would enhance public debate in Turkey and a number of other young
democracies like South Africa and the Philippines.
In democratic transitions, pluralism and diversity do not mean much if
they consist only of a competition between pro-government media and
ultrapartisan opposition outlets. Private ownership in the media sector
must be structured to allow the existence of a credible, independent,
vibrant and high-quality Fourth Estate.
This is the core lesson of the Turkish media outlets’ spectacular
failure to cover the Gezi Park protests, and their subsequent aggressive
outbursts against the international media outlets that chose to cover
Turks marching through the streets of Istanbul rather than penguins
waddling across the ice of Antarctica.
The more media moguls get involved in shady dealings with governments,
the more their greed blocks all decent journalism and destroys
journalists’ ability to hold the government accountable. A corrupted
media can never uncover corruption in a credible manner.
