But this claim does not answer the logical question: If the government's intention is this, why would it not start with smaller, more harshly opposing groups and media outlets that would be easier to terminate and leave Doğan alone? Anyway, as they keep talking about freedom of the press one does not stop thinking about what the Doğan Group understands from freedom of the press. Today, I want to talk about a very recent, funny, but striking, example. White Turks, or the laicist nationalist Turkish elite, started emerging about 120 to 150 years ago. The Young Turks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are the intellectual (and in some cases actual) grandfathers of today's white Turks. Those Young Turks received a materialist and positivist education. To a great extent, they blamed ethnic and religious minorities for the collapse and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and decided that only Turks were Turks' own friends and that others could not be trusted. In most cases, the nationalism of Young Turks and today's white Turks borders an exclusivist racism coupled with an inferiority complex against Westerners. I will not try to list countless manifestations of this heartbreaking phenomenon here. But white Turks' nationalism has its limits in the sense that it does not revere and respect all ethnic Turks, either. If you are a black Turk -- someone with a rural, working class, traditional or religious identity -- you are destined to be belittled constantly by the white Turks and their media. They will never respect you, your values, lifestyles and so on. They will easily fabricate libelous news defaming you. And they will never publish your corrections and objections, sometimes even if you get a legal verdict or injunction. Worse still, if you are from the east or south of the world (non-West), you will be regularly insulted without even becoming aware of it. They might easily refer to Arabs as dirty, lazy, mischievous, voluptuous, etc. Africans can easily be referred to as cannibals. The list goes on. I am not talking about what they say in their private conversations, I am referring what they publishing in their dailies.
The last, but as I said above, very striking example took place last week. One of the Doğan national dailies, Vatan, published a news story about a Turkish academic working at well-known Monash University, Dr. Salih Yücel -- who is a respected friend of mine. According to the news, “Dr. Yücel, who works at the Australian Center for Islamic Studies, went to the Maldives [a Muslim country] -- as he did several times before -- to present a paper at a conference, but because his beard was too short and his trousers were too long, he was not admitted to the country.” After the Vatan daily published this news, the Cihan news agency contacted Dr. Yücel, who told the agency that first Damla Tan of the Vatan daily and then Emre Öztürk of the same newspaper contacted him by e-mail, and Dr. Yücel told him that every detail was wrong. He is a clean-shaven man anyway, let alone having a short beard. I am sure that the people in the Maldives too wear trousers. Dr. Yücel also told Vatan that he received VIP treatment and that the deputy president invited him to a dinner at his home. He also told the Vatan daily that it was the first time he went to the Maldives and he does not work for the Australian Center for Islamic Studies, which does not exist anyway.
Despite all this, Doğan's daily Vatan went on publishing the fabricated news without a shred of evidence and without mentioning anything Dr. Yücel told them, and they also published a picture of a man who is not Dr. Yücel. The Vatan daily did not bother referring to Cihan news agency's correction of the news. Why should they care? They are not after the truth and proper journalism but simply entertaining their readers who are not working class people but rich laicist nationalist white Turks who would be very pleased to read news that will feed into their stereotypical and racist prejudices and who would then remind themselves once more “how happy is he who calls himself a Turk! God forbid, one might be born a Maldivian.”
When Mr. Doğan's men write and talk about freedom of the press, justice, honesty and respecting others, I simply want to cry: Stop using concepts that do not have anything to do with you!
