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Repressed media and illiberal politics in Turkey: the persistence of fear
Murat Akser
,
and
Banu Baybars
Journal Article
published in 2022
This article examines the historical roots of the role of successive Turkish governments’ fear of media and Turkish media’s fear of government authority with respect to the development of press freedom over the long run and closely analyzes the historical pressures imposed on journalists through legal and informal means. We focus particularly on the economic and political pressure on the media in Turkey and offer three arguments regarding the fear in Turkish media: (1) Media fear is historical rather than a rupture that happened during the Justice and Development Party era; (2) out of fear of losing power, the governments use structural, legislative and extra-legal factors to the advantage of the ruling party to support a friendly media-ecology; and (3) the repressed media attempt to come out of this ecology of fear by utilizing new tactics of reporting, such as alternative media and citizen journalism.
These excesses and abuses are now epitomized in the AKP elite and President Erdoğan’s actions after the July 15 coup attempt. With the change in the Turkish constitution as President Erdoğan gained legal and executive powers, the AKP government is virtually a one-man show, having acquired its legitimacy for its political abuses from Erdoğan’s 2018 electoral victory. During the post-coup environment arose a more authoritarian media environment exacerbated by the sweeping powers granted to the president in 2018, which enabled the state of emergency declared in the post-coup to practically never end. The bureaucracy, politicians, and the legal system under Erdoğan found new ways to control media and journalists, motivated by their constant fear of losing power or elections and being held accountable for their human rights abuses. The victims of this repressive regime are journalists who are arrested and awaiting trial and their media outlets. One can see this in the longstanding news media like Hürriyet Daily and Cumhuriyet Daily are operating today as passive and ineffective institutions with no critical coverage of the AKP government. The journalists of the past, some of whom died to uphold certain principles, believed in the freedom of expression and the right to report without limits.
Sample
Studies focusing on press-party parallelism in Turkey point at increasing government visibility through media capture, especially in times of general elections. As Yıldırım, Baruh, and Çarkoğlu indicate, competitive authoritarianism may lead to higher press-party parallelism over time (2021). Yet this does not guarantee the total extinction of the persistence and resistance of oppositional media even in conditions of the extremely low visibility of opposition political parties in the dominant media ecology. What kind of solutions are to be found to fight such oppression of the journalists and the media? The answer lies in new resistance from below. The repressed media has the potential to come out of this ecology of fear by utilizing new tactics for news reporting (independent, social media, activist media). The social media organization of alternative resistance groups during the Gezi Park protests showed the citizen media reporting via social media.Main Findings
There are now multiple platforms online operating outside AKP’s control (Ataman and Çoban Citation2018). These include T24, which is an instant online news portal, and BIANET, which is a human rights-based news portal. P24 is a citizen journalism platform, and 140Journos relies on university students in different cities. Finally, Medyascope was created after fired journalists gathered to become online journalists. These new news platforms all face financial difficulties, but they have relatively more freedom to report the news than more established news outlets (Akser and McCollum Citation2019). Even a former mob boss turned into an investigative journalist through social media in contemporary Turkey, as in the case of Sedat Peker’s YouTube revelations throughout 2021 (Bianet Citation2021).Policy recommendations/implications
Turkish media and the political elite have had a longstanding relationship that incorporates elements of mutual fear. Media owners of the past, today’s media conglomerates and independent journalists, experienced the authoritarian excesses of the Turkish political power both in regular times and extraordinary times like wartime or times of military coups. One of the reasons for such a problematic relationship is how Turkish journalists position themselves and give themselves the role of the guardians of the democracy, as deliverers of truth to the people, and even as the fourth force to counter elected politicians and their excesses and abuse of power. The pro-government journalists are part of the fear spectrum as they also represent themselves as guardians of truth from the perspective of the political/economically repressed Islamists of the 1990s. Especially conservative women journalists act as guardians of AKP’s truth and accept that they have to defend the current government, albeit they resort to authoritarians not to lose the current power status of their fellow Islamists (Özcan Citation2019). From this perspective, as evidently, these journalists openly declare that they will not be critical but supportive of the AKP, which makes it very difficult to regard them as serious and unbiased journalists instead of propagandists.These excesses and abuses are now epitomized in the AKP elite and President Erdoğan’s actions after the July 15 coup attempt. With the change in the Turkish constitution as President Erdoğan gained legal and executive powers, the AKP government is virtually a one-man show, having acquired its legitimacy for its political abuses from Erdoğan’s 2018 electoral victory. During the post-coup environment arose a more authoritarian media environment exacerbated by the sweeping powers granted to the president in 2018, which enabled the state of emergency declared in the post-coup to practically never end. The bureaucracy, politicians, and the legal system under Erdoğan found new ways to control media and journalists, motivated by their constant fear of losing power or elections and being held accountable for their human rights abuses. The victims of this repressive regime are journalists who are arrested and awaiting trial and their media outlets. One can see this in the longstanding news media like Hürriyet Daily and Cumhuriyet Daily are operating today as passive and ineffective institutions with no critical coverage of the AKP government. The journalists of the past, some of whom died to uphold certain principles, believed in the freedom of expression and the right to report without limits.
- Research focuses:
- Physical, Psychological, Digital, Legal, Financial
- Methods used in research:
- Interviews, Qualitative content analysis
- Countries of research focus:
- Turkey