It consists of a series of well-known film posters elaborately recast with the columnists from the newspaper instead. Instead of Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone wearing a black tie and red rose, we had the paper’s wimpish arts correspondent posing as the Godfather instead. The Sharon Stone of “Basic Instinct” was replaced by a columnist who made headlines not for taking off her knickers but for putting on a headscarf in a puerile bit of investigative reporting to discover what it’s like to roam İstanbul’s night scene in pious garb. The whole thing was (how should I put it kindly) just not very funny, or at least there was only one thing that made me laugh -- Hürriyet’s hyperactive “citizens’ defender” Yalçın Bayar dressed up as a kick-boxing Cüneyt Arkın in the cult 1982 “Star Wars” rip-off “The Man Who Saved the World.”The first parody (if that is not too strong a word) was positively disturbing. It featured the paper’s controversial editor of 20 years, Ertuğrul Özkök, posing as “Mr. White” along with a few of his colleagues as the string-tie-and-sunglasses-sporting villains in “Reservoir Dogs.” That film ends in a bloodbath and mayhem, and of course it could have been just coincidence that Hürriyet’s re-enactment burst into print on the very day of its own long sharp knives. Mr. Özkök was stepping down after 20 controversial years on the job. He was handing the reins over to the paper’s Ankara correspondent, Enis Berberoğlu, who made his own appearance in the supplement as Morpheus, a character in “The Matrix” who makes the protagonist swallow a bitter reality bill. This change at the top of Turkey’s most profitable newspaper coincided with the resignation of its proprietor, Aydın Doğan, from the holding company that bears his name. He is handing over leadership to his daughter, a move that prompted an immediate 9.6 percent rise in the price of Doğan Holding shares. The market anticipates that the changing of the guard will lead to a softening of Hürriyet’s anti-government stance and to the settlement of the group’s whopping $3.3 billion tax fine, in effect transforming the “Titanic” into a remake of “The Great Escape.”
The critics of Turkey’s media drama have little sympathy for the Doğan dilemma, and I have been guilty of staging my own re-enactment of “Crocodile [Tears] Dundee.” Some are offended by its condescension towards the government and its supporters. And of course a New Year’s supplement that is full of hermetic in-jokes is grist to this particular mill. However, Hürriyet, like everyone else, has the right, short of hate speech, to parade even its unpalatable prejudices. After all, many who write for the paper and a lot of its readers don’t sympathize with women wearing headscarves. What is not a right is to print what you know to be wrong at someone else’s command. There has always been suspicion that Hürriyet leased its column inches to a cabal within the state and that it scratched backs or used its power of intimidation so that the parent company could make money in non-media spheres. In the past, it posted stories that allowed troops to suppress hunger strikes in prison with brutal force. It painted the backdrop for the prosecution of Orhan Pamuk and the persecution of Hrant Dink.
And while some may gloat over Özkök’s return to the pasture, frankly there are few editors anywhere in the world who have lasted quite so long. From one perspective, Mr. Doğan’s attempt to lower his profile is simply good management. If one looks at the Doğan share price rally, it is not because the market thinks the media group will adapt a greater sense of integrity but because they suspect it will dance more in step to the government’s tune. Those who criticize the most must show that they are not themselves embedded with the powers that be. As the “Reservoir Dogs” poster puts it, “Every dog has his day.”
