DESTABILIZATION OF POWER HIERARCHIES IN THE FIELD OF JOURNALISM, 2002 – 2013
Previous balance of power was disturbed to the advantage of the party not only in politics. A similar transformation took place in the field of journalism. As explained in detail in the second chapter, political and economic power holders strongly influence news content in Turkey. Since the 1980s, in particular, patronage relations between businessmen owners of the media outlets and the government defined the mainstream practice of journalism. When power relationships in politics were destabilized after 2002 so were relationships in journalism. The previous chapter demonstrated that the AKP used a number of material and symbolic forms of state intervention to redistribute power in politics. In this chapter, I address how these forms of intervention disturbed the power hierarchies in the journalistic field, as well. In the subsequent chapters, I then explain how the destabilization in power hierarchies in both politics and journalism shaped journalists’ meaning worlds and hence their practices.
This chapter specifically demonstrates that post-2007 disturbances in the structure of journalism worked to the advantage of pro-AKP media outlets. Here, I show how opponents and proponents came to differentiate themselves through political trials, transfer of media ownerships, dismissals of journalists, and the accompanying discourse of punishment and purge of the enemies of the nation. I also show how the opponents’ disempowerment brought about the proponents’ empowerment. Surrounded by a discourse of punishment and purge,
political trials, transfer of ownerships and dismissals worked to block the “enemy”’s access to claims-making in the media while increasing the access of the “friend”. Here, the tide has turned against the media outlets and the journalists associated with one or the other fronts of “political enemy”. After 2007, religion and public expression of religiosity also turned into a basis for establishing patronage relationships with the party that remained entrenched in the state.
Journalists and Political Trials: Terrorism or Professional Conduct?
In the political trials, journalists were accused of being members of the alleged Ergenekon or KCK organizations. The first wave of arrests in the Ergenekon trial came in 2008 when Mustafa Balbay, the Ankara bureau chief and columnist for the secular Cumhuriyet, and Tuncay Özkan, journalist and owner of a cable channel also known for its defense of secularism, were charged with attempting to overthrow the government. The second wave of arrests followed in 2011.
2011 was a particularly devastating year for journalists in Turkey as the number of journalists in jail in the country swelled to over one hundred. This made Turkey the country with the highest number of jailed journalists in the world (CPJ 2011) (See Figure 5). The arrests started in February 2011, when the headquarters of OdaTV.com, a political news website known for its anti-AKP stance, was raided by the police. Its founder Soner Yalçın was detained along with seven others, and all were charged with collaborating with the Ergenekon organization, inciting hatred and enmity among the public and possessing secret documents related to national security (Yeşil 2016).
Figure 5. Number of Journalists in Jail (2002-2013) Source: Committee to Protect Journalists.
Another wave of detentions followed in March 2011. The investigative journalists Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener were accused of being part of Ergenekon’s propaganda wing. Ahmet Şık had spent much of his professional life uncovering the unlawful acts of the nationalists who were accused of being members of Ergenekon. At the time of his arrest, Şık was preparing to publish a book, Imam’s Army – then a manuscript titled 000Kitap -- on the Gülen movement’s infiltration of the police force, providing evidence for how the judiciary and the security forces were corrupted by the movement. Nedim Şener had also published a book in 2009 alleging that Gülenist police officers were responsible for the assassination of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. Searching for copies of Şık’s manuscript, the police raided the offices of the publishing house, Ithaki, Şık’s prospective publisher, and the newspaper Radikal. Authorities confiscated the unpublished manuscript. In the trial, it was cited as a tool for propaganda and an evidence of the connection between Ergenekon and the journalist Şık (AlJazeera 2013b).
The arrest of the two journalists sparked outrage among journalists both domestically and internationally, and cast doubt on the Ergenekon trial. Şık and Şener stressed that the case against them had been fabricated by the Gülenists, and that the ongoing investigations were not part of a democratization process but an attempt to silence the voices of the opposition. However, neither the public unrest nor international press organizations’ calls for freedom of the press led to a change in the discourses mobilized by the party in defense of the trial process. A month after Şık and Şener’s arrest, when the Prime Minister Erdoğan was pressed at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on why these journalists were arrested he compared Şık’s book to a bomb and chose to distance the party from the trial process by reference to judicial independence:
It was not me who made the decision for the seizure of that reportedly unpublished book. It is a crime to use a bomb and to use the components a bomb is made of. Are the police not going to step in if they receive information about the construction of a bomb? So if there was according information, the judiciary made the decision and told the police to go and take it. … This was a decision taken by the judiciary and not by the executive. When you are concerned you call the judiciary independent. When Turkey is concerned, you say that the judiciary depends on the executive. Yet, the judiciary in Turkey is independent, it does not depend on the executive. (Bianet 2011a)
Similarly, when the EU Chief negotiator Egemen Bağış was pressured on the number of arrested journalists in Turkey on the BBC’s renowned news program “Hard Talk,” he went so far as to claim that there were no journalists arrested due to their professional
activities, and that some of the arrested were people “who carried journalist identification cards and have been caught while raping another person.”
The government’s discourse of “criminal journalists” and more specifically “terrorist journalists” was further strengthened when in the KCK trials 51 journalists from the pro- Kurdish news outlets Dicle Haber Ajansı and Özgür Gündem were arrested and charged with either being integrated into the KCK’s so-called Press Committee or seeking to advance the organization’s agenda by propaganda.
For example, on December 20, 2011, the police raided the office of Özgür Gündem, rounded up nine journalists and accused them of supporting terrorism based on their coverage of the PKK. Özgür Gündem is known for its detailed coverage of the armed conflict in southeastern Turkey throughout the 1990s and for highlighting human rights violations and discrimination in its publications. In the 1990s, during the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish military, Özgür Gündem was subjected to a wave of brutal repression. Its Istanbul office was bombed and according to the newspaper’s own records between 1992 and 1995, twenty-three of its staff members were murdered51. Today’s Özgür Gündem is a successor to the original newspaper, which was forced to shut down after the bombing of its Ankara office in 1994 (Simon 2015). After operating under various names for a decade, Özgür Gündem was formally relaunched in April 2011 and was immediately hit with a wave of prosecutions. Özgür Gündem journalists were accused of participating in PKK-organized “media training” conferences held in the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq (Simon 2015).
51 See the movie “Press” (2010) by Sedat Yılmaz and the documentary “Witnesses of the War” (2012) by Sami Solmaz for more detail.
In other cases, too, journalists’ support for Kurdish ethnic rights, their criticism of the actions of the Turkish military, and their references to PKK leaders even in basic news reporting were considered acts of terrorism. For example, the editor Vedat Kurşun of the Kurdish daily Azadiya Welat, which was launched in 2006 and had to hire nine different editors since then because all had successively been arrested, was arrested during the KCK operation in 2010. He was sentenced to 166 years in prison for disseminating terrorist propaganda by using the terms “Kurdistan” and “guerilla” in his op-ed pieces, for publishing his interview notes with the imprisoned PKK leader Öcalan and for quoting other PKK members (Yeşil 2016).
Throughout the KCK press trials, the government’s narrative of the accused was not much different than its narrative of the journalists of the Ergenekon trial. Accordingly, the journalists were detained not for their professional activities but for being terrorists. The Interior Minister Idris Naim Şahin for instance, compared writers and journalists to PKK fighters, and noted that there was “no difference between the bullets fired [in the Kurdish southeast of Turkey] and the articles written in Ankara.” (The Guardian 2012)
During the course of the political trials, multiple journalists reporting on the investigations were charged with violating the secrecy of an ongoing trial. Between 2008 and 2010, when the Ergenekon investigation was at its most intense, approximately four thousand cases were opened against journalists (Yeşil 2016). Many of these cases were launched under Article 285 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes reporting on a confidential criminal investigation, and Article 288, which criminalizes attempting to influence trial proceedings.
Overall, the political trials functioned as a mode of state control over the profession of journalism. The trials defined the enemies of the nation through incarceration and the
political discourse. Journalists and news organizations in ideological proximity to either the staunch secularist or the Kurdish political fronts were in this context not only jailed but also stigmatized as terrorists. In this vein, they lost their access to claims making in the media both materially and symbolically.
Media Outlets and Transfer of Ownerships
One other method instrumentalized was the transfer of media outlet ownerships. Up to 2011, approximately 30 percent of the newspaper circulation has changed hands, moving towards groups closely affiliated with the AKP (Çarkoğlu et. al. 2014). The auction transfers of ownerships were made through TMSF, which had emerged as a central actor of capital transfers in the aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis. State banks, which were strengthened in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis, also turned into significant actors in these transfers by providing easy credit to party supporters in the buying of auctioned outlets. In the process, seizures and auction transfers were presented as part of Turkey’s purge from corrupt affairs. The discourse of friends and foes of the nation set by the political trials was used by politicians to legitimize the seizures of media assets.
In 2007, shortly before the general elections and in the midst of the presidential election crisis, TMSF seized the ATV/Sabah network, which was established in 1985 and bought by Ciner Group in 2005, on criminal charges surrounding the earlier sale. The chief editor of the newspaper at the time, Fatih Altaylı, notes that the clash between the group and the political authority first started when the newspaper published the headline: “Prime minister, the chief prosecutor” (Özvarış 2015b). The ATV/Sabah network was the second largest media group in Turkey. In December 2007, following the AKP’s electoral victory,
TMSF sold the network to Çalık Group for $1.1 billion. With this sale the ownership of the ATV, Yeni Asır TV, and Minika TV channels, the Radio Turkuvaz, and Romantik Radyo radio stations, and the Sabah, Takvim, Yeni Asır and Pas Fotomaç newspapers were handed to Çalık group, in addition to the distribution company Turkuvaz Dağıtım.
The public tender held by the TMSF to sell the Sabah/ATV to Çalık was highly controversial. Legally, RTÜK was the appropriate authority to ratify the tender. During the tender process, however, the government attempted to change the legislation regulating the activities of RTÜK in a way to introduce more flexibility to the financial operations accompanying the tender process (Buğra & Savaşkan 2014). In addition, two Turkish state- owned banks, Halkbank and Vakıfbank, as well as the Qatari Al Wasaeel media network stepped in to provide loans and enable the purchase (Akın 2009, Karadağ 2010).
The existing ties between the Çalık group and the ruling party played a significant role in the group’s purchase of the network. The owner of the Çalık Group was a close friend of the Prime Minister, and Erdoğan’s son-in-law was the general manager in the group. The group was allegedly even called by the prime minister as “Our Çalık” back in 2006 in one of the prime ministers’ meetings with Aydın Doğan, the owner of the Doğan Media Group (Milliyet 2009). Also, President Gül had himself admitted that he personally had introduced Çalık to the Qatari partners (Karadağ 2010).
The sale of the Sabah/ATV network to Çalık Group led to the emergence of what came to be known as the “pool media”, where business groups allied with the government would enter into a coalition to finance the take over of auctioned media outlets by proponent business groups. The “pool” would also help proponent outlets when they encountered financial hardships. I should also note that these groups had close ties with one another. The
founder of Çalık group, Ahmet Çalık, for example, had family ties not only with the Prime Minister but also with the Gülen movement through his brother-in-law, the license holder of the daily newspaper, Zaman, known to be the most important media organ of the Gülen movement (Buğra & Savaşkan 2014). According to Mehmet Altan, who long wrote as a columnist at the Star newspaper but was sacked in 2011, in addition to property transfers, one other method of supporting the proponent media was advertisements. Altan noted that advertisements for proponent newspapers were collected with political pressure. Those who would were compelled to pay for advertisements (Akın 2012).
The Sabah/ATV network’s transfer was followed by a tax fine imposed on the Doğan Group, the largest media group in Turkey, in 2009. The discursive framework for the transfer of the Doğan Group’s properties was set in 2008 when the daily Hürriyet and other media outlets owned by the Doğan Group began to publish stories about a German investigation to the Deniz Feneri charity organization. The charity was alleged to have channeled money to AKP leaders52. Erdoğan raged and interpreted this as a smear campaign directed at the AKP government by the opposition party CHP and its “collaborator”, Doğan Group:
Recently, those who cannot downgrade the AK Party engaged in a campaign of abuse against the AKP. Yet, enough is enough! The Doğan Group is taking an
52 The daily Hürriyet owned by Doğan Group reported that €7 million were transferred to the Deniz Feneri organization’s Turkey offices, €1.8 million were transferred to Beyaz Holding from the organization’s subsidiary operating in Germany, and there was no information regarding the remainder of the donated funds. According to the expert witness report, the organization’s executives were also handed millions of euros in cash. Two suspects claimed that high-level Turkish officials, including Zahid Akman, the president of RTÜK, were involved in the deception. A foreigners’ office in Germany banned Akman from entering the country in 2007 for five years following claims that he had committed a financial crime (Hürriyet 2008).
active role in this. It is carrying out this campaign with the CHP. When I lay this down, he [Aydın Doğan] will clearly say “The prime minister has pointed me as a target” or “The prime minister has pointed my group as a target.” It is ok when you [Aydın Doğan] point the AK Party as a target but it is not ok when the prime minister targets this newspaper that points his party as a target. Well, it [the prime minister pointing the newspaper as a target] is ok!
The prime minister further noted that Aydın Doğan was launching this smear campaign because the AKP would not let him engage in a rent-seeking relationship with the state, as he did in the past:
Nobody can throw the mud of corruption at AK Party. Those who throw the mud of corruption will suffocate in that mud. … AK Party is not one of those usual political parties. Tayyip Erdoğan is not one of the usual prime ministers, either. You will know this! They [the other prime ministers] could have bargained with Aydın Doğan. Are you [Aydın Doğan] writing all those [referring to the corruption allegations] because you cannot make me bargain with you? The reality behind all those campaigns is [the reality about] Hilton [Hotel, which is located at Taksim, Istanbul, and owned by Aydın Doğan]. He could not make me and my mayor [the mayor of Istanbul] accept his modification plans at Hilton Hotel. He proposed this [the modification plan] to me and my mayor in person. Because he could not get his plans out of me he continues with his campaign. From now on there is no permission for making the big buck, winning all the marbles in secrecy. We will announce everything openly and clearly to the nation. In fining the largest media company of Turkey, the AKP has instrumentalized the
discourse of purging politics from corrupt relationships. In doing so, the media was associated with the secularist front which was accused in the public discourse surrounding the Ergenekon trial of attacking the AKP, the so-called representative of the nation’s will:
… They [the CHP] are not concerned about this country’s development, progress. They never had such a concern. … Yet, this campaign that they have been continuing with for weeks should not be left without a response. Because, this campaign that they have been carrying out together with that media group, places my name in that file on Deniz Feneri in Germany. Has money been transferred to Tayyip Erdoğan, the Prime Minister? Did I get any money? … It is not possible to understand what kind of human beings these are. Sooner or later, justice will be served. The more the hits are, the stronger we get. The more the hits are, the stronger we get. They cast aspersions on us, the stronger we get. We will get even stronger! (Habertürk 2008).
In response, Aydın Doğan accused Erdoğan of blackmailing him, of exceeding the limits of his power as the prime minister and of threatening the freedom of expression in Turkey with the tone of his speeches. According to Aydın Doğan, Erdoğan’s speech was a turn in the history of the press in Turkey:
I am openly telling him: If I have an unlawful demand on Hilton, the public authority has the duty to refuse. However, if I as a citizen am making a legitimate request and it is not realized, this is also a crime. Turkish laws do not grant the Prime Minister the right to commit crime. I am curious about this: Why is the Prime Minister so interested in the issue of Hilton? I thought the Hilton issue is within the jurisdiction of the Istanbul municipality. Or has the management of the