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Erdogan’s heavy hand in Turkish media

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s personal call to a TV station to immediately stop a news scroll reveals the extent of the restrictions on press freedom in Turkey.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrives at Rabat airport at the start of a tour of the Maghreb region, June 3, 2013.    REUTERS/Youssef Boudlal (MOROCCO - Tags: POLITICS) - RTX10AEE
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Freedom House, a respected Washington-based nongovernmental organization, on Feb. 3 released the special report “Democracy in Crisis: Corruption, Media and Power in Turkey” focusing on government pressures and restrictions on the freedom of media in Turkey. Freedom House said a team visited Turkey in November 2013 to meet with journalists, civil society, business world leaders and upper-level government officials. The report says that the government in the last seven years has been restricting freedom of media through intimidation, imprisonment and wiretapping. Thanks to intimate interest relationships with media bosses, firings are used extensively as tools of intimidation and punishment

The natural outcome of these pressures is a suffocating self-censorship and censorship atmosphere that prevents the Turkish media from performing its basic function of informing the public accurately and objectively.

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