There is a paradox here. By rights, the critical power of the press is the lifeblood of society. It is the force that maintains the integrity and transparency of the public realm. Totalitarian regimes are slow to learn and make wrong decisions because sooner or later they end up believing their own propaganda. On the other hand, the media often reserve their indignation for other people. One of the things they do is make their customers feel good about themselves. All their barking is just for show.After all, many choose a newspaper or turn to a television channel because they think it takes their side. There was a period after the introduction of private television in Turkey when news editors competed for the most lurid if inconsequential stories and portrayed their star reporters as lonely knights fighting a world wracked by hypocrisy and deceit. The result was that many people starting tuning back to the old Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) state-owned network, where the stories were comfortably dreary about this or that minister traveling hither and yon. So while most have a conception of the media as exposing unpalatable truths, there is a limit to people's appetite for information which they themselves find unsettling. It is the brave editor who challenges readers' prejudices rather than confronts them.
It is tempting to think that one measure of a democracy's maturity it the degree to which a society accepts criticism and refuses to indulge in the sort of conspiracy theories which blame everything on everyone except themselves. In practice, even the most sophisticated societies are capable of sustained self-delusion. Genuine reform is a painful process of working through self-interested denial. Last week the US House of Representatives managed to go the full nine rounds in the fight to control climate change. It narrowly passed a bill which tries to change the economics of energy consumption and adds the real environmental cost to carbon fuels. Opposition was intense, and it was the attitude of those who still voted against that pre-occupied New York Times commentator Paul Krugman:
“A defining moment in Friday's debate was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a ‘hoax' that has been ‘perpetrated out of the scientific community.' I'd call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax, you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists -- a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice,” Professor Krugman writes.
Ankara has not yet got around to quarrelling about global warming, but the same cognitive dissonance that occurs in America occurs there. There is the same reluctance to empathize with those with different core values (for “abortion” read “headscarves”) and the same tendency to bray at a distance from the opposing side. This division in Turkey is often abetted by the press itself, which all too often sees its primary responsibility to keep its own “side” unified rather than report upsetting or counterintuitive news. And all too often this polarization is fuelled by the non-press interests of media proprietors. Opinion columns often reflect genuine debate, and there are lots of good journalists and brave reporters. But the large pica headlines on the front page all too often depend on whether the owner has a reason to support or attack the government.
Turkey is now going through a difficult process of reform. It is coming to terms with years of military tutelage to the civilian government and wrestling with the turning over of sovereignty to the European Union. It needs a press that just occasionally bites the hand that feeds it.
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