It takes only 24 hours for any writing on press-freedom restrictions in Turkey to go stale. Hardly a day passes without a fresh blow to media freedoms.

A few weeks ago, the media reported that the Sabah newspaper censored the articles of its ombudsman Yavuz Baydar — also an Al-Monitor contributor — in which he criticized his newspaper for ignoring the Gezi Park anti-government protests. A newspaper censoring its own ombudsman was unprecedented even in Turkey, whose press-freedom record deteriorates by the day. Having censored two of Baydar’s articles, Sabah notified him formally on Tuesday, July 23, that he had been dismissed. The notification said that Baydar’s criticism of the state of press freedom in Turkey in an article he wrote for The New York Times amounted to an insult to his newspaper.

Baydar is hardly the only journalist to have been fired after the Gezi Park protests over reports that annoyed the government. According to the Turkish Journalists Union, 22 journalists have been fired and another 37 have had to resign since the Gezi Park protests erupted in late May.

The Turkish government’s interventions are not limited to ensuring that authors of unpleasant writing are shown to the door. A government agency, the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF), has seized publicly indebted media entities and sold them off to companies close to the government. Earlier this month, the TMSF sold the Sky360 television channel and the Aksam newspaper to the Kolin-Limak-Cengiz consortium, without holding any public tender or auction. The same consortium had been awarded the project to build a third bridge over the Bosporus. The TV station and the newspaper were handed to the consortium virtually as the bonus of the bridge contract.