The media in Turkey has unfortunately always deemed it a right and even an authority to depose and establish governments and thus has endeavored to manipulate politics through the publishing and broadcasting of policies it adopts. It has also abused its journalism by using it as an instrument for its political stance, which it doesn’t reveal, thereby trying to mold a certain public opinion. There have been moments when some TV stations and newspapers gave the impression that they were propaganda machines for a certain political viewpoint. Media-politics relations are controversial all over the world; however, it is virtually impossible to come across media in any other part of the world that make as large an effort as is exerted in Turkey to manipulate politics, even if it means twisting reality. The media organs that don’t honestly declare, unlike those in the US, which party, candidate or view they support, prefer to twist the truth through manipulative publishing or broadcasting perpetrated in the name of objective journalism.
During critical periods in particular, we more frequently encounter the Turkish media’s manipulative and denigrating news reports. The clichéd campaigns against “religious reactionaryism,” thought to be fruitful at such times, have now become tradition: Some marginal groups and activities considered normal by a pluralist society are “divulged” once again with great prowess. They carry out campaigns that last for weeks over such matters. In this regard the simplest religious ritual is introduced as a threat to the regime; the Koran schools, whose existence is widely known, are established as a source of reactionaryism; the most innocent booklets about how to pray as evidence that religious reactionaryism exists; and the headscarf-wearing ladies who have always existed in this society are presented as proof of rising Islamic bigotry.
These campaigns are perpetrated with an openness that can be easily realized, since the goal is not only to form a certain public opinion or to make the public believe that a threat exists; what is targeted by these publications and broadcasts is generating instruments, pretexts and reasons for the exploitation of the elitist faction and clandestine powers, rather than making it to the conscience of the people. And the Turkish media is quite successful in this.
Thanks to our media, events that would be found too silly to bother about, even by children, are immediately made into regime threats that must be crushed at once. And the supreme law, high bureaucracy and some clandestine powers are immediately activated with a “mission consciousness.” Sometimes even the Turkish military takes action, as if the power of these groups was not sufficient. A regime crisis is sparked by simple folkloric elements, and tanks are sent to squares with the intent of protecting the regime. In the meantime the fact that our fragile democracy has once again been interrupted is not cared for one jot by our “democratic” media.
An even sneakier campaign carried out by the media is the efforts of a certain ideological view and people from the past to unobtrusively turn Turkey’s agenda upside down. And there is a very clear socio-political explanation for this.
These days it is being openly stated that the AK Party government has been trying to take the media organs under its control, whereas the reality is totally the opposite. The truth, clear to anyone following Turkish newspapers and television, is that those working and writing for those establishments criticize the government’s policies with a devotedness that can only be seen in members of the CHP.
It is actually quite normal for our colleagues, who are the voluntary partners of the campaigns perpetrated under the guardianship of the CHP, to behave in this way, because today the dominant views in the Turkish media are those of the leftist ideology of the generation of 1968 -- which is against religion, ethics and a sincere and true nationalism -- and this generation’s journalism school, Cumhuriyet.
And therefore the Turkish media, with some exceptions, is made up of various tones of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, which favors retiring into one’s self and which is elitist and anti-democratic. Even looking at the number and positions of those former Cumhuriyet employees in the newspapers they now work for, and what they write, would be enough to confirm our thesis.
Nevertheless, I’m hopeful about democracy in Turkey despite this media, since I now sincerely agree with the common view that has now become a slogan: “The one supported by the media loses; the one opposed by the military wins.”
