The piece was not, however, about the assassination of the Armenian editor Hrant Dink, whose life and untimely death was marked by a moving award ceremony in İstanbul on Monday night. A co-recipient of that award, Alper Görmüş, was gagged by another tried and tested method when he was imprisoned in 1996 for an interview he published three years previously in Aktüel magazine. Mr. Görmüş was also at the helm of Nokta when authorities effectively shut the magazine down, seizing computers in an early morning raid in 2007 in reaction to a cover story giving convincing evidence that senior military officers were actively involved in plotting a coup d'état. These allegations seem commonplace two years on, but Nokta paid the price for being first. To the best of my knowledge (i.e., after an Internet search) The New York Times did not report Nokta's closure. Its indignation in Saturday's editorial was directed at the multi-billion dollar tax penalty imposed on the parent company of the Doğan Media Group related to irregularities in one of its non-media businesses. The Doğan amalgam of press titles and television networks now faces an uncertain future. “A hefty fine is often an effective cloak for repression,” the editorial quotes Joel Simon, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and we are left with the clear impression that an upright member of the Fourth Estate is being felled by a particularly dirty trick. However, it is hard not to conclude that a famous newspaper that prides itself on publishing ALL the news fit to print has, in this case, left out the most interesting part of the story.
I do not doubt that the current Turkish government, like those that preceded it, uses both carrot and baseball bat to get the media on its side. Yet even were the elected government to value a free and vital press (and there are days when this appears to be the case), the question remains whether the press itself is prepared for the role. It is not by accident that the word “jurnalcı” doesn't mean journalist, but was used to refer to police informers in the late-19th century reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. That half-truths and disinformation can be enlisted in the interest of the state is a notion that dies hard. Indeed, it was a Doğan newspaper, Hürriyet, which spearheaded the defamation campaign against Hrant Dink which led to his conviction for insulting the Turkish state and created the climate which led to his assassination.
Some 10 years ago I was myself grateful to the CPJ for coming to my own defense when I faced a six-year sentence for a column I wrote critical of the Turkish military. Yet my own conclusion from the experience was that I needed less protecting from the Turkish judicial system which ultimately acquitted me, than from my own newspaper, (the non-Doğan group) Sabah, which fired me for yet another offense very much at the insistence of the National Security Council (MGK). I realized that it was not Turkish journalists who were embedded with the state so much as Turkish proprietors, whose own financial interests deprived them of editorial independence and whose dubious business ethics left them vulnerable to government pressure.
I concur with the Times that it is wrong for the Turkish government to enlist the tax authorities to wage political battles. And I feel concern for the future of some excellent colleagues in the Doğan media outlets who are loyal to the integrity of their profession and whose only interest is finding enough space to do their jobs properly. But I share the widely held distaste for a newspaper group that has pioneered a style of journalism that has been damaging to Turkish democracy and which is more concerned about narrow interest than free discourse. At the back of my mind I recall how no one ever condemned the US federal prosecutor for trying Al Capone on charges of tax evasion when they couldn't make a case for racketeering.
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