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Press Freedom in the New Turkey

The complexity of the Turkish media scene cannot be understood without knowing its background.
Turkish policemen watch from the roof of Ataturk Cultural Center at Taksim Square in Istanbul June 18, 2013. Performance artist Erdem Gunduz became the new symbol of anti-government protests in Turkey on Tuesday after his eight-hour vigil in Taksim Square earned him the nickname "the Standing Man". Gunduz said he was protesting in solidarity with demonstrators who were evicted at the weekend from Gezi Park adjoining Taksim, an intervention by police that triggered some of the most violent clashes to date. W
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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. 

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