In his column yesterday, Andrew Finkel analyzed the unchanged (or perhaps growing) asymmetry in politics and wrote the following:“There has been some debate on this opinion page over whether the Doğan Media Group, which now faces a half billion dollar tax bill, is the victim of a vengeful government, its own slick practices -- or (as seems likely) both. I have received letters urging me to temper my own criticisms of the group’s newspapers. However imperfect, they may be the only opposition force left.”
True, in certain situations the press may feel obliged to leave its traditional role of being “critical” and, by crossing the line, transform itself into a political force in place of nonexistent ones. The press in Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Russia swiftly come to mind. But including these, none of these cases are ever remembered to have led to successful and substantial challenges to governments whose “I rule as I please” mood was born amid political asymmetry. Therefore, it would be naive to buy such an alternative. The press should never be loaded, however precarious the situation, with duties other than the ones that define its raison d’être.
Second, the illusion of “forgive and support”: Over the decades, whenever political competitors have been weakened (mostly by their own internal dynamics, based on strife, fractionation, personal rifts) to the point of irrelevance, the last-minute proposals before voting have always been “We do not like this party as it is, or its leader, but we have to vote anyhow despite our heartache.” It does not require high mathematics to understand that this dilemma, which enters the mindset of Turkey’s helpless voters more often than not, is the poison of democracy.
As almost all cases show, in democracies, sometimes things will have to turn really bad before they become better. What if the course irreversibly leads to an abolishment of democracy? As the voters here must strive to pave the way for new political formations (as was the case with the conservative right in Turkey), so must a strongly (overwhelmingly) supported party in government work in order to let its adversaries freely grow to challenge it. If both sides fail in the test of morality, then expect the worst-case scenario. Not much to be done, is there?
What if the press has been largely responsible for the impasse in politics due to the fact that its filthy relations -- now a standard -- with power circles have led to one corrupt government after another? What if the press was long ago welcomed as the most useful instrument in politics? What if the press was long ago turned into an object of politics, while the standard procedure of its work should be vice versa?
Thus, to “forgive and support” a sinful, unrepentant press should be considered equal to the naively favored notion of endorsing political actors whom you feel are responsible for the gloomy future that awaits all of us.
The reason I am following the latest debate between Foreign Minister Ali Babacan and some columnists of the Doğan Media Group on the US State Department’s Human Rights Report on Turkey with a bitter smile should explain my point: Babacan downplayed the content of the report as “a text prepared by the real backbenchers of the department” (not to be taken seriously), while Doğan newspapers covered -- totally ignoring the detailed accounts of harassment of Kurds, torture, etc. -- solely the segment criticizing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attitude toward the press.
However, you will not find, for example, stories or comments on the views expressed in the report in any of the major outlets of the Doğan Group:
“Individuals could not criticize the state or government publicly without fear of reprisal, and the government continued to restrict expression by individuals sympathetic to some religious, political, and Kurdish nationalist or cultural viewpoints. Active debates on human rights and government policies continued, particularly on issues relating to the country’s EU membership process, the role of the military, Islam, political Islam, the question of Turks of Kurdish and other ethnic or religious origins as ‘minorities,’ and the history of the Turkish-Armenian conflict at the end of the Ottoman Empire. However, persons who wrote or spoke out on such topics, particularly on the Armenian issue, risked prosecution. The [Turkish Publishers Association] TPA reported that serious restrictions on freedom of expression continued despite legal reforms related to the country’s EU candidacy.”
Have any of those “mainstream” (!) papers been on the front line defending free speech? The given response also explains the sheer absence of the paragraph below (from the same report) from their news stories:
“Most media were owned by large, private holding companies that had a wide range of outside business interests; the concentration of media ownership influenced the content of reporting and limited the scope of debate. Observers noted that media conglomerates increasingly used media as a tool to build pressure against government policies.”
