David (now Lord) Putnam, Oscar-winning director and one of the original cast of Tony Blair’s celebrity supporters, was describing in a recent interview the current mood of dismay, in contrast to the euphoria when New Labour came to office nearly 10 years ago.The immediate reason for this disillusionment is, of course, the subterfuge that the Labour Party higher-ups used to raise campaign funds, reportedly swapping contributions for peerages in what might be a contravention of the law. But there is a deeper well of cynicism -- not simply in British politics but in democracies elsewhere -- about the transfer of power from those who make policies to those who make images. Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, was widely credited with being more powerful than his ministers. Under his rule Labour was seen not so much as making news as manipulating it. This created the same sense of impunity that gave the Bush administration the confidence to cherry pick the evidence to invade Iraq. Ever since Richard Nixon lost the 1960 televised presidential debates to a more cleanly shaven John Kennedy we have entered deeper and deeper into an era of media-manufactured truths, an age of spin.
The word “spin” -- to throw the ball in such a way that it is hard for the batsman to keep his eye on it -- comes from cricket (or is it baseball?). So perhaps it is not surprising that the metaphor doesn’t translate into Turkish. The problem is (and I would be delighted to be contradicted) that I can’t find an equivalent at all. The friends I rely on to build up my specialist vocabulary were of little help. One, a social scientist of some repute, explained that there was no need for a special concept to describe what most take entirely for granted. Not only do politicians not expect to be reported correctly, not only do journalist expect to be lied to, but the press all too often collude in the process. While American commentators look for new pithy ways to describe the Truman Show reality in which we live (”wikiality”) or the Bush-like tendency to believe what you want rather what is demonstrably so (”truthiness”), Turkish newspaper readers just curl their lips and speak of the “medya.”
Cynicism can, of course, be a healthy thing. I was on a journalism fellowship in Michigan at the time of the build up to the Gulf War and recall the incredulity among the non-Americans in our group at official justification for hostilities compared to the trust evinced by many of my hard-nosed American reporting colleagues. The foreigners -- from Indonesia or Argentina -- assumed as a matter of course that their politicians would mislead them. It took the majority of Americans until the 2006 midterm elections to really get the point. On the other hand it is a genuine problem when the public realm is so clouded and polluted that ordinary people have little trust in debate at all.
There are countless examples of how society is damaged by this process. The grave of Hrant Dink, the murdered Turkish-Armenian editor, is still fresh enough to remember how he was judged both in the courts and in the press not for what he believed but what he was depicted to believe. The reality was that he wanted reconciliation between Turks and Armenians, the spin was that he hated “the Turkishness in his blood” -- an expression plucked out of context. The truth is that there are many people in this country weary of enmity based on race, the truthiness is that Kurds and Armenians and Turks cannot think alike.
There is a difference between holding people accountable for their words and treating words as bullets that cannot be put back in the gun. During the Kurdish Nevruz holiday, a time when nationalist passions run high, the main story was the leader of the opposition, Deniz Baykal, accusing the prime minister of endorsing terror. His reasoning was that that the premier once, in a radio interview seven years ago, used the word “Mister” in conjunction with the convicted head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan. Some papers supported Mr. Baykal’s criticisms, others thought he was being silly. Then we heard Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rebuttal -- and so for more than two days the incident made the news.
The controversy was a distraction. It brought no one nearer to defining the problems in the Southeast, locating where things have gone wrong, or establishing what an acceptable solution might be. I sometimes think that those who set the terms of public debate do so with contempt. They think Turkey not only expects lies, but that it wants to be deceived.
