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.
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.
The report says: “Editors and journalists in the mainstream media say that they receive regular phone calls from the prime minister’s office to change stories, to downplay coverage, or to fire reporters or columnists.”
“A free press is a vital actor in any democracy, providing accountability and encouraging a healthy public debate. In Turkey, with a weak opposition and judiciary, an unfettered press is essential. The muzzling of the press in the last seven years has contributed to the wide disjuncture between citizens and their government. It is both a symptom and a cause of the current crisis,” Freedom House says.
