Press Freedom in the New Turkey
The complexity of the Turkish media scene cannot be understood without knowing its background.
Press freedom is a key issue for Turkey. After successfully eliminating the former militarist-Kemalist regime, Turkey is still starting down the road to a liberal democratic regime of which press freedom is an indispensable element. But as I emphasized in my first article for Al-Monitor, Turkey is now undergoing a post-Kemalist transition characterized by bizarre political alignments and in which everything is tangled with everything else.
Naturally, this situation is reflected in the Turkish media scene. Under the former regime, the mainstream media could never criticize the Turkish military. Renowned Turkish journalists praised the army but trashed the democratically elected civilian governments. The military supported the efforts of the mainstream media to discredit democratic political institutions. Under the Kemalist regime, political parties competed with the military, and not with other political parties. The mainstream Turkish media and journalists were always army partisans. They did not support elected political leaders such as former Prime Ministers Adnan Menderes and Turgut Ozal, but the generals. In 1960, the military overthrew Menderes and hanged him. In 1993, Ozal died under suspicious circumstances. There is now a court case about his death. The Ankara public prosecutor decided that Ozal was poisoned by a junta inside the army.
It is because of this tarnished political past that the majority of Turks today support the campaign that was launched with the slogan “You hanged Menderes and poisoned Ozal, but we won’t let you consume [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan." In the polls since the Gezi events, support for Erdogan has exceeded 50%.
According to some, under the former regime, the Turkish media was more powerful than the military. Turkish capitalists who owned the media exerted pressure on civilian governments in cooperation with the military. Elected civilian governments came under direct attack by the mainstream media whenever they advocated democratic steps in such taboo issues as Islam, the Kurds, Cyprus and the Armenians. "Secret files" leaked to the media by military intelligence were used as tools of character assassination against politicians who deviated from Kemalism. Governments were wary of the media and refrained from making democratic reforms.
