On May 1, Freedom House, a Washington-based research institute, published its 2014 rankings, in which Turkish press freedom declined from “partly free” status to “not free” status. This, as expected, caused shock waves in Turkey. The opposition saw the Freedom House report as yet another confirmation that Turkey has become a mere “dictatorship” under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party). The government, in return, dismissed the report and blamed Freedom House for biased propaganda. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, in particular, gave a bold response. “Press freedom in Turkey is even freer than countries deemed to be 'partly free,'” he said, and added: “Our journalists should reject this report.”
With all due respect to Davutoglu, I, as a Turkish journalist, will not reject the Freedom House report on Turkey. Because I think it is quite accurate. But I also think that its evaluation of Turkey is not as negative as what both the government and its opponents seem to think. It rather confirms that Turkey is neither a dictatorship nor a liberal democracy: It is an illiberal democracy, which has in fact recently made progress in some areas, such as minority rights, and regressed in others, such as press freedom.
To see this, you need to look not just at the “Freedom of the Press” category that Freedom House examines, but also the “Freedom in the World” category, which gives the overall rating of freedom in a country — not just freedom of the press, but all political rights and civil liberties. In this latter, more comprehensive evaluation, the Turkey of today ranks as “partly free” as it always has since Freedom House began measuring.
Yet there are shades and grades in this “partly free” category. Notably, the Turkey in the pre-AKP era (1999-2002) was again “partly free,” but with a very bad score of 4.5 in a scale of 1 to 7 (1 is best, 7 is worst: Sweden gets 1, North Korea gets 7). Then, during the first term of the AKP, Turkey’s freedom rating improved, with a jump to 3.5 in 2003, and to 3.0 in 2005. From 2005 to 2012, this score remained the same, but it had a slight decline in the past two years, regressing to 3.5.
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