Under Strain, Turkish Journalists Go Online
Turkish journalists are increasingly looking to digital and social media to avoid government censure and pressure, writes Yavuz Baydar.
Their profession having been increasingly restricted by the political authorities, the judiciary and — most visible of all — by the greedy media barons, Turkey’s dignified, respected journalists are seeking new, free and independent paths.
While large swaths of their colleagues are under the strain of self-censorship due to daily political and economic pressures, some of them have found a way to inform the public properly: through online news portals, websites and social media.
The recent scandal at the daily Milliyet has become a game changer. It began at the end of February, with the newspaper publishing a scoop on the government's negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), revealing minutes of the meeting between the PKK’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and the deputies of the PKK’s political wing, the Peace and Democracy Party.
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was quick to lash out at Milliyet for running what he saw as an unprintable story, and the publishers of Milliyet, the Demiroren family, trembled. As a result, the editor of the newspaper, Derya Sazak, was forced to retreat and told to fire an internationally known, veteran journalist, Hasan Cemal, because he had defended the good journalism of Milliyet, for which he had long been a columnist.
