The arithmetic of ‘they dominated the press’
by
ESER KARAKAŞ*

After the referendum, likely to be passed, the opposition will arrive at a junction: They will either choose to walk down the road of the rhetoric of “the empty-headed man who scratches his belly,” the cacophony of “they dominate the press” and the irrationality of “these people are incorrigible,” or they will take the logical and productive road of “What mistake have we and are we making?”

I hope they take the second road after seeing the referendum results and act in a reasonable manner because doing so would increase the quality of political competition.

Among these debates, I am particularly intrigued by the rhetoric of “they dominate the press.” It is true that in democracies any attempt by the government or the opposition to control the press or the media contradicts with the very idea of democracy.

The opposition has long argued that the press and the media are being controlled by the government and even that the control amounts to some 90 percent. These claims are accepted as a given in society.

I, as a person who is aware of the fact that control of the press by the government or the opposition poses a great risk in a democratic society, take these claims seriously, but these allegations must first be verified.

As a person who takes the opposition’s claim in question seriously, I conducted a small search on the Internet and found the circulation and rating figures for papers and TV channels. Knowing which of them are close to the government or the opposition, I can get the results through a simple method.

Looking at newspapers

First, let us start with the newspapers. I took the circulation figures of the newspapers for the period of Aug. 2-8, 2010 from the website www.gazeteciler.com, and I concentrated on the figures of the top 15 papers, excluding those that are soccer oriented.

I assumed that the Zaman (687,000), Sabah (337,000), Türkiye (136,000), Takvim (124,000), Star (106,000) and Yeni Şafak (104,000) dailies are close to the political power and summed up their circulation figures to get a grand total of about 1.5 million.

On the other hand, assuming that the Posta (505,000), Hürriyet (436,000), HaberTürk (254,000), Sözcü (209,000), Milliyet (160,000), Akşam (144,000) and Vatan (143,000) dailies are close to the opposition, and I obtained about 1.9 million as an aggregate figure for the circulation of these papers.

I excluded the dailies Cumhuriyet, Vakit, Yeni Çağ, Taraf and Radikal as they are not included within the top 15 papers, but it is easy to see that even if they are included in the calculation, the results will not change much.

Clearly, the total circulation figure of the papers that do not give open or tacit support to the government is higher than that of the papers that are close to the political power. One is free to include the remaining papers in the calculation and see that the result does not change.

So it is clear that the opposition’s claim that “they dominate the press” does not hold true.

The visual media

As for the visual media, let us see the monthly ratings of TV stations from the website www.medyatava.com. There are recent figures about individual programs, but the overall rating figures belong to the April 2010 period at the latest.

Let us apply our quick and dirty method to the visual media figures, and let us focus on the general primetime ratings of the top 10 TV stations. First, let us sum up the rating percentages of the channels that distance themselves from the government: Kanal D (22.9), Star (9.5), Fox (7.8), Show (7.4), HaberTürk (0.7) and Flash (1.5). Clearly, the total ratings figure of these channels is about 50 percent.

Now, let us see the percentage rating of the channels known to be close to the political power: ATV (15.1), Samanyolu TV (5.3), Kanal 7 (4.1) and Cine (0.6). The total figure of the ratings for these channels is about 25 percent.

Even if you assume that all the remaining channels are close to the government -- which is an unfounded assumption to make -- it is not possible to say that the government controls the TV channels in terms of ratings.

Even this simple math shows us that neither print media nor broadcast media are dominated by media organizations that are close to the government. The opposition is attempting to portray quite the reverse picture using poor quality arguments and false accusations such as “the pro-government media.”

They can act with such ruthlessness as it only damages their reputability.