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Turkey’s pro-Erdogan media purge

The unexpected dismissals of three top executives from two of Turkey’s key pro-Erdogan newspapers has led to questions about the power games in the ruling AKP.
Newspapers are displayed at a newsstand on January 24, 2012 in the Karakoy neighborhood of Istanbul. Turkish newspapers criticized the January 23 vote by the French Senate making denial of the Armenian genocide a crime. The French Senate on January 23 approved, by 127 votes to 86, the measure which makes it an offence punishable by jail in France to deny that the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turk forces amounted to genocide. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on January 24 slammed as discr
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On Nov. 24, an unexpected purge took place in the pro-government segment of Turkish media. Three top executives of two prominent pro-government national dailies, Star and Aksam, suddenly lost their jobs. They were fired by Ethem Sancak, a prominent businessman who owns both papers. But many believe Sancak would not have made such a major decision without the approval of the ultimate boss, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That is why, since then Turkish journalists have been discussing, and gossiping about, the political significance of this in-house purge.

The three journalists in question are Mustafa Karaalioglu (media group manager) and Yusuf Ziya Comert (editor-in-chief) of Star, and Mehmet Ocaktan, the editor-in-chief of Aksam. All three are veterans of Turkey’s Islamist/conservative political movement and have a longtime alliance with Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). (Ocaktan even served as an AKP deputy in the Turkish parliament in 2007-11.) They have been frequent guests in Erdogan’s presidential jet, to which only supportive journalists are invited. That is why their dismissal came as interesting news in a country where the dismissal of non-pro-Erdogan journalists has been too common to create any surprise.

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