He called upon newspaper proprietors to rein in their columnists whose loose talk was causing the market to take fright. Up until then, the firewall had stood firm between the Turkish economy and headline-catching events. Indeed, the rating agencies had even stopped tut-tutting about the size of the Turkish deficit and began to realize that compared to Greece or spendthrift Britain, the Turkish Treasury was a model of good financial housekeeping. But last week, the sight of public prosecutors trying to call so many senior officers to account for past misdeeds began to sink in. Analysts, peering through the fog of arrests and accusations, began to suspect that an early general election might be on the horizon. That old nemesis, “uncertainty,” began to creep into view.Members of the press rightly saw the prime minister’s outburst as a flagrant case of shooting the messenger. There is now an online petition which calls upon Mr. Erdoğan to defend press freedom, not criticize the results. It’s at kontrolsuzkoseyazarlari.wordpress.com, which translates as the whacky “girls just wanna have fun” sort of title of “columnists out of control.” Remarkably, the petition brings together writers from warring newspapers who normally find it next to impossible to agree about anything else. It lines up the beefy Kemalist Hikmet Çentinkaya from the opposition paper Cumhuriyet with Ayşe Böhürler of Yeni Şafak, a founding member of Mr. Erdoğan’s own party. The petition included secularist pin-up Ruhat Mengi from metrosexual Vatan newspaper and secularist dartboard cover Abdurrahman Dilipak, who writes for the often religiously rabid Vakit. Hürriyet is juxtaposed with Zaman, Habertürk with Taraf and even the editor of the paper you are now reading has lent his name.
Mr. Erdoğan has since backpedaled from his initial remarks. It was never his intention, he says, to induce a proprietor to fire this or that columnist -- merely an admonition to the newspaper proprietors to keep a weather eye on the “quality of the goods” their shops were peddling. However, that politicians meddle in the affairs of newspapers should come as no greater surprise than to learn that army officers meddle in politics. My own eyes were opened very early on in my career in the Turkish press. I never did discover which was chicken and which was egg, but Sabah became ever more vitriolic in its criticism of the Motherland Party (ANAP, now ANAVATAN), which in turn was raising the price of newsprint. Turgut Özal encouraged the Cypriot businessman Asil Nadir to found a press empire that would hum the government’s tune, and I recall my shock when the Güneş newspaper, the liberal and principled flagship of the Nadir papers, fired its satirical columnist Yalçin Pekşen for poking all-too-accurate fun at then-Prime Minister Özal. The other day I listened to the story of how Süleyman Demirel extracted a fulsome apology from another columnist (a signee of the “out of control petition”) by waving the whiff of a tax audit under the nose of his proprietor. I don’t think anyone inside the state-owned (and publicly funded) Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) believes they enjoy editorial independence.
The other side of the story is that there are columnists and newspapers who do not need to be intimidated by authority and who are all too happy to discipline themselves. We have seen in the leaked documents that the coup plotters had a list of those columnists who could be trusted and those who needed rounding up. So at a time when Turkish journalists are looking at their own professional standards as hard as they are looking at the next day’s news, Mr. Erdoğan’s careless remarks stabbed at a raw nerve. While it is true that the government must get used to the sound of just criticism, journalists as a profession must learn to criticize themselves.
