The pandemic shock doctrine in an authoritarian context: the economic,bodily,and political precarity of Turkey’s journalists during the pandemic

Instrumentalizing the pandemic and entrenching journalists’ political precarity

Contextualization is essential in grasping how Covid-19 exacerbated journalists’ economic precarity while giving news companies and the government a medical excuse to entrench political precarity. Turkey’s journalists’ health care coverage depends on employment status. Typically, the employer covers health care premiums, while self-employed journalists or freelancers have to pay their own premiums. In our case, while the journalists employed by mainstream channels were given both universal health care provided by the state and private health care services provided by their employers, freelancers and some of those employed by international news outlets paid their own premiums, depending on how much they earned. In addition, Turkey’s journalism field has largely depended on field reporting, both before and after the pandemic. Journalists covering national politics, health, the environment, socio-political events, and governmental affairs typically work outside their offices, but in order to do so, they need state accreditation.

Journalists experience political precarity because the ruling Justice and Development Party has refused to issue accreditation cards to some, ontologically limiting journalists’ capacity to work as economic subjects and speak truth to power in an authoritarian atmosphere, even well before the pandemic. The government’s selective vaccination campaign during the pandemic has worsened critical journalists’ political precarity. By the first day of April 2021, only journalists who held official (turquoise-colored) accreditation cards were listed for vaccination. Other journalists were added to the vaccination list only a month and a half after trade unions of journalists and the Turkish Journalists’ Association questioned this exclusionary vaccination policy (DW, 2021). Freelancers not on the payroll of any media organization were excluded.

Different from techno-economistic notions of precarity, political precarity involves an ongoing form of violence inflicted upon journalists who daily negotiate the terms of their profession with the arbitrary tactics of an authoritarian regime. Indeed, the political implications of the arbitrarily designed accreditation and vaccination policies are stark. While accreditation involves a seemingly neutral and mundane (but still political) relationship of recognition, the selective vaccination policy is reminiscent of what Mbembe (2003) calls a necropolitical regime that distinctly interacts with the economy, biomedicine, and politics. At the economic level, the necropolitical regime of journalism produces precarious and potentially surplus populations of journalists by allowing certain groups of journalists to suffer economically. At the biomedical level, it implements a selective vaccination campaign that creates a dichotomy of journalists and people that are less journalists than journalists. Yet, necropolitical logic also operates along the question of political recognition involving the threat of death and at times an unlimited amount of social, economic, and symbolic violence (Mbembe, 2003).

In their everyday lives, journalists regularly face prosecution, online harassment, and physical attack by both security forces and pro-government mobs. The fact that such journalists are called “a virus” attests to the necropolitical violence they face, exposing how government officials explicitly perceive certain journalists as a superfluous group toward whom they feel no responsibility or have no intent of recognizing as professional. Ultimately, as an outcome of the state’s active interventions to regulate journalism through a necropolitical logic, pervasive political precarity leads to an impasse, undermining journalists’ ability to factually report to the public and devaluing their existence as political subjects.

Although the government had long been limiting the coverage of and banning most oppositional public demonstrations prior to the pandemic, Covid-19 has distinctively given the government a pretext for obstructing journalism channels by physically limiting the capacity to report from the field and obstructing information flows using bureaucratic tactics. Therefore, the “pandemic shock doctrine” is not simply about digital surveillance but also the intensification of economic precarity, normalization of bodily risk, and the medicalization of an ongoing state of emergency for political pressure. We argue that since March of 2020, when the first Covid case in Turkey occurred, the political claim to protect public immunity through a medical state of emergency has boosted journalists’ and citizens’ immunity to authoritarianism, meaning that political precarity has become entrenched and the lack of independent journalism has been nationally internalized. Within a national context in which the state of exception (Agamben, 2005) has become almost the rule, we dewesternize precarity by adding multiple layers through the lens of the laboring body and politics.

The slow death of Turkish news media

Journalism has been undergoing multiple crises involving economic, technological, occupational, and political dimensions (Waisbord, 2019). Struck by commercialization, journalists suffer from precarious labor conditions (Cohen, 2016). In technological terms, performative cultures of metrics transform the profession (Christin, 2020). In occupational and ethical terms, professional values are eroding (Deuze, 2007), and journalists face intimidation from state officials, paramilitary groups, and online mobs (Ong and Cabañes, 2019). Now enabled by outsider politicians in Western liberal democracies, the intimidation of journalists, delegitimization of mainstream media, and the political desire to censor media are not limited to non-Western contexts (Van Dalen, 2021; Waisbord, 2020).

The slow death of mainstream media in Turkey has been ongoing for at least four decades, beginning with the 24 January 1980 economic decisions that limited state subsidies for newsprint and caused a surge in paper prices. This event transformed ownership structures because one now had to have financial investments in finance, banking, energy, and mining in order to practice journalism. Similarly, advertising became a central filter in the news business following the withdrawal of public subsidies. Consequently, the 1990s marked the transformation of the media in Turkey from “commercialization to conglomeration” (Kaya and Çakmur, 2010: 526), causing the collapse of the relative independence of the press from the state and big capital (Adaklı, 2006). Because the dominant “laissez faire” rhetoric in the economy strengthened the symbiotic relationship between the state and media owners, journalistic autonomy suffered (Kaya and Çakmur, 2010) as patron-client relationships instrumentalized reporting and partisanship (Yeşil, 2018: 239).

The ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) came to power in 2002, promising to protect and improve freedom of speech in line with its EU bid. However, these reform promises were not kept. The 2.5 billion USD tax fine imposed against one of the largest media companies – Doğan Group – in 2009 was but one major element of the JDP’s hybrid coercive (prosecution of journalists, the shutting down of media institutions, and financial and legal fines) and non-coercive (disallowance of subsidies and tax breaks or the withdrawal of advertising from anti-government media) strategies of media capture (Yeşil, 2018). Since 2013 (the year of the Gezi Uprising) and 2016 (the year of the failed coup attempt), the government has been using coercion as its main strategy to control media.

The outcome of the government’s coercion tactics has been dark. Journalists are regularly politically and physically targeted. At least 48 journalists were detained in a single year, and 23 were sentenced to a total of 103 years and 3 days in prison, while at least 18 were attacked (Bianet, 2021). The government’s financial punishment of media companies that fail to comply is ongoing. The Bia Media Monitor Report (Bianet, 2021) suggests that RTÜK (the Radio and Television Supreme Council) issued 70 broadcast suspensions and 19 million TL in fines in 2020, with opposition channels receiving 25 times more fines than others. The pressure on journalism has produced a large army of unemployed journalists. Over the 5 years following 2016, the number of journalists losing their jobs reached 3436, with a record dismissal or forced resignation of 215 journalists and media employees (Bianet, 2021). Against this dire economic background, we examine how the pandemic has amplified Turkey’s journalists’ precarious livelihoods.

Economic precarity deepens for local journalists, freelancers, and young workers

During the pandemic, the Turkish government introduced a “short-time working allowance” to mitigate unemployment. However, according to a comprehensive report by the Union of Turkish Journalists, journalists find the state subsidy for enforced “shortened working hours” insufficient, highlighting that they still had to work full time due to pressure placed on them by employers. Inconsistencies in salary payments, cancelation of food or transportation subsidies, designation of overtime, increased workload due to remote work, and lack of workplace safety measures are some of the problems reported by 1206 journalists and press workers participating in the Union’s study (TGS, 2021). As Bildirici (2021: 53) notes from this report, 9.4% of the participants experienced pay cuts, 18.8% were forced to take compulsory leave, and 12.5% were fired.

The pandemic affected journalists unevenly. While those employed in mainstream media at least received regular salaries, local journalists, freelancers, and young journalists were severely hit. One of our participants, Mustafa (aged 50), had been a local journalist for almost 20 years at the time of this research and was running a local news website in Eastern Anatolia. He was receiving social security and was paying the mortgage of a house he had recently bought. The pandemic exacerbated local journalism’s economy in his city because local newspapers failed to sell advertising and could therefore secure short-term working allowances for only some of their employees. Due to previous debts, the money that some local newspapers expected to receive from the Press Advertising Agency (Basin İlan Kurumu) was blocked. One local newspaper even advertised its own sale in its headline. At the age 50, Mustafa was unable to make future plans:

I never had dreams about making big money. Thank God [with irony] our profession precludes such aspirations. Since you don’t know how much you’ll make and when, you cannot quite make plans.

Another participant, Ekrem, a cameraman aged 46, previously worked in numerous local and national outlets but was freelancing for an international news agency and paying his own social security premiums. During the first 3 months of the pandemic (April, May, and June 2020), he didn’t work at all. Although he was able to work in July, August was a low point, as he had to take out bank loans, which intensified his anxieties because he had no health insurance. The mandate to work from home during the initial periods of the pandemic meant substantial economic loss:

There is a reporter who has multiplied his earnings. He is writing from home and using Skype and Zoom for interviews. For me, that doesn’t work. Zoom and Skype have taken our jobs.

Elif (aged 37) had been working in the media for 11 years. Since 2016, she had been freelancing, which she said she enjoyed because she preferred to be in the field to examine whether official discourses reflected reality. Still, she claimed that she wished her earnings were better and that she had failed to pay rent for 2 months:

I haven’t been able to do any freelancing for Desknews [pseudonym], where I used to learn and was paid well . . . Before the pandemic, I was at least able to apply for positions. Now, nobody hires full-time journalists. There is no prospect of full-time work. The pandemic killed this.

Although her claim that “the pandemic killed this” hints at the natural death of “full-time” employment, the necropolitical regime behind Turkey’s journalism field suggests that who or what is left to die is a political decision made by newspaper owners.

Dilek (aged 30), a freelance photojournalist in Istanbul, considered freelancing to be a “euphemism for unemployed journalists.” She claimed that Turkey’s journalists were in “a cage” that had become even more suffocating after the pandemic:

There is demand for work but not workers. There is demand for photographs but not photojournalism . . . I have been questioning this profession a lot lately . . . How do you call something your profession when you cannot establish certain standards? I don’t want to see myself having failed to reach those standards.

Dilek’s remark concerning “the demand for work but not workers” echoes that of Elif regarding full-time employment in that news media owners use the pandemic to increase pressure on already precariously employed freelance journalists. Although journalists have been economically hit, the impact further damages one’s affective attachment to the profession in that one begins to question whether what one does for a living is truly considered a profession when certain standards are absent.

Aylin (aged 28) was the web editor of an oppositional newspaper where she had previously interned. She claimed that interning was so exciting that she never imagined the working conditions would be so dire: “Like many others, I have been working without any social security and receive a very minimal salary,” she said. The promises to give her full-time employment were constantly delayed with the advice “to be patient.” Access to subsidized health care during the pandemic became so paramount that she discussed the issue with her boss once again, but the newspaper took advantage of the pandemic by informing her that “many are unemployed during the pandemic, and the newspaper has received many good CVs.” Due to her low salary, she had to rent an apartment “with no sunshine and almost no fresh air.” “If it weren’t for their support of meal tickets, I would have starved. In fact, there were many days I didn’t eat. In fact, I don’t think I can live like this because I am 28 and have a lot of needs that I cannot satisfy. I can only manage not to starve,” she added. Aylin’s distinction between survival and fully living her life suggests that there is more to life than physical survival. As such, despite the fantasy that waged work is non-violent, it does, in fact, breed violence. When asked how she coped with precarity caused by the political calculation of her boss, she replied:

I feel I am imprisoned. Who will hire me and contribute to my social security? I cannot go back and live with my family. I don’t feel like I am living a real life. I don’t think I can cope and continue to struggle. I tell myself that the newspaper has been an arena of struggle and they have defeated me. They don’t even see me.

Aylin’s cry for healthcare and demand for visibility reveals how the necropolitical economy of journalism works in violent ways. Decisions about who gets to work from where and under what conditions are not natural outcomes but political decisions, with the pandemic allowing news media owners to decide who gets to live and who gets to barely survive, or survive at all. Young and freelance journalists were deemed disposable by their bosses and the larger political-economy of journalism in Turkey that financially thrives via journalists’ precarization – a necropolitical logic that targets journalists’ bodies both in and outside of their offices.

Bodily precarity and stigmatization due to infection

Journalists’ primary capital are their bodies, which assimilates them into the capitalist labor process. The body is what news media owners aim to surveil and control in the name of productivity. This capitalist logic of differentially ascribing value to journalists’ bodies intensified in the context of the pandemic. While the desire for productive bodies persisted, journalists’ laboring bodies also emerged as sources of risk and targets of stigmatization. Some of our interviewees had either contracted Covid-19 or worked in news departments with a history of virus transmission. Their narratives reveal the bodily and emotional outcomes of transmission while highlighting how news institutions dealt ambiguously with the virus. Some institutions were supportive, while others stigmatized workers, failed to provide care mechanisms, and even forced infected journalists to work from home.

Prior to her position at a municipality’s newsdesk, Canan (aged 26) had been working in a pro-government private mainstream news channel at the national level. Although she was securely employed, she decided to resign because of how her bosses reacted after the first Covid-19 cases. She and her colleagues wanted to know how the channel would protect its journalists, but her boss was dismissive of the virus. As the crisis became more severe, the channel constructed two “container offices” in front of the building. Journalists resisted this arrangement because the containers would facilitate virus transmission and they would not be allowed to use the bathrooms or the cafeteria in the main building. There appeared to be a clearly classificatory logic of “worthy” and “disposable” journalists. For Canan, this pointed to the management’s character: “If you decide to make 16 people work in a container during a pandemic, that shows you’re a bad person.” Photos of the container were leaked to a website, triggering the management’s war on outspoken journalists. Along with others, Canan was encouraged to take her annual leave and not return. She and two of her colleagues accepted on condition that they would receive a severance package.

Oğuz and Peri worked at another channel broadcasting at the national level. Oğuz (aged 51) had been in the sector for almost 30 years and had been employed at his then-current job for 21 years. As a journalist who had experienced a fairly stable professional life, Covid-19 was an unprecedented crisis: “I now anxiously change my path when somebody sneezes,” he said. Oğuz contracted Covid during the initial months of the pandemic and felt that his institution backed him. During his recovery, the editor-in-chief called Oğuz almost every day, but his feelings after returning to work were more ambivalent. He felt that his colleagues’ distance to him was “weird,” and they jokingly called the camera crew’s office the “Corona room.” He also felt stigmatized because some reporters that he had worked with for years now avoided working with him. “I don’t know if this is mobbing, but it’s sad,” he said. When he visited the channels’ archive, the archivist did not want to touch the tape he brought from the field. Although Oğuz was aware that people knew relatively little about the disease during the initial months, he still struggled with his return to work.

Peri (aged 36) had been working in the media for 12 years at the time of this study and had been working at the same news channel as Oğuz for the preceding 2 years. She was the first employee to contract Covid, and like Oğuz, she too felt fully supported by the channel. Her editor-in-chief called contacts at the Ministry of Health to have Peri tested. Still, her return triggered anxiety at the newsdesk. She reported that one of her colleagues tidied her desk, telling her that “perhaps you contracted the virus due to the mess on your desk.” This bothered Peri because upon her return, people seemed to avoid her:

I had many arguments. Obviously, you take the mask off when you eat or drink something. They attack me saying it was because of me since I take the mask off when I am eating and put them at risk. We experienced some meaningless tension.

The interviews with both Peri and Oğuz reveal how a colleague’s laboring body suddenly becomes a risk in journalism’s necropolitical economy. Furthermore, although both Oğuz and Peri felt supported, the channel’s case-oriented pandemic management could not prevent the translation of structural medico-social risks into interpersonal tensions based on stigmatization. In other words, personal support is less costly than structural measures, which illustrates the political design of pandemic management by news organizations.

Sevil’s (aged 34) experience at another national news channel was the most problematic. She had been in the news business for 8 years at the time of this study and oversaw a foreign news desk. For her, the channel prioritized profits at the expense of journalists’ bodies. She revealed that journalists were sometimes forced to take long unpaid leaves and believed that the channel did not consistently implement flexible and remote work. She claimed that her employers did not care about workplace safety and wanted employees to come to the office as long as they were being paid. She also revealed that there were not enough precautions taken for office ventilation. In the second half of October 2020, the lack of regulations caused massive infection, and during the span of about 10 days, 5–10 journalists were infected, although even this did not force her employers to conduct massive testing. She said:

We were all anxious. Who should I contact? Which hospital are we going to? We don’t have private health insurance. The channel had no medical agreement with any hospitals. We paid from our pockets for tests. It was a mess. Nobody knew where to go. Would there be reimbursements? We could have gone to state hospitals, but the results take 2-3 days . . . I tested positive on the seventh day of the outbreak, when they finally carried out widespread testing at work.

Clearly, the channel was individualizing risk and outsourcing bodily costs. There were about 60 positive cases when the channel finally implemented general screening. Although the channel instructed employees to stay home if they showed symptoms, they still asked a journalist who had tested positive to continue working: “My colleague couldn’t sleep even for an hour,” said Sevil, “let alone a day. She wasn’t able to rest in the morning. They wanted news from us as if Covid-19 didn’t exist. They sent our computers to our homes.” Sevil also shared her own experience of working while sick:

It was psychologically devastating. I got the virus at work, and they put a reminder of the office right in the middle of my living room. I couldn’t turn it [the computer] on for two days. I looked at it with anxiety because I had a medical report for ten days of rest, and it was only my fifth day. I shouldn’t be working, but my only colleague at my desk also tested positive. So, I would have felt bad not working while they did.

Stigmatization from colleagues, lack of workplace precautions, dismissive employers, and employers’ pressure to force journalists to work even when sick attest to how the journalistic field is designed to structurally force news workers to face stigmatization, be exposed to virus transmission, and accept increased workloads on an individual basis. These signs of bodily precarity rose to a new level when the government used the pandemic as a pretext to suppress journalists’ quest for truth, which we explore next.

The pandemic as political pretext: obstructing protest reporting, throttling information flows, and deepening political precarity

Despite the use of the pandemic as a public health pretext “to ban demonstrations by opposition parties and government critics and to target critics of the government” (HRW, 2021), women’s rights groups, students, doctors, and medical workers still organized various meetings to protest the government. One important national protest was that of the bar associations. Lawyers from various cities marched to the capital city of Ankara to protest a new law that would create pro-government bar associations and tame dissent. Journalists we interviewed emphasized how security forces used the pandemic to limit field reporting. Experienced freelance photographer Ali (aged 30) described security forces’ tactics in Istanbul:

Police forces interrupted protestors’ press releases with their loudspeakers, asking protestors to maintain social distancing. Yet, when the police were dispersing these gatherings, the police acted as if there was no contagious disease.

Dilara (aged 28), a reporter working for an independent outlet who covered the bar protest in Izmir, similarly emphasized security forces’ arbitrary handling of public events:

At the time, [football] fans could gather in cafes to watch Altay or Göztepe (local football teams) matches while not maintaining guidelines of social distancing. They were not warned, but the bar members were not permitted to gather.

Deployed in the name of public health, these authoritarian tactics arbitrarily prevent journalists from simply doing their job. While diminishing journalists’ working capacities, these tactics also symbolically inflict violence on journalists by forcing them to negotiate with security forces daily. This negotiation by force occurs on unequal grounds and is emotionally taxing, causing journalists to question their worth as journalists.

As part of these arbitrarily designed tactics, security forces further limited journalists’ access to high-profile trials, including that of the ODA TV news website, where journalists were convicted for “revealing state secrets.” Working for an international media outlet at the time, Hasan (aged 48) was appointed to cover the trial on June 24, 2020 and had to navigate through security forces. According to Hasan, these hearings could have been held in larger courtrooms:

Of the 28-30 people admitted to the courtroom, six were journalists. However, they did not even allow other journalists to enter the corridor of the courtroom. . . There were bigger courtrooms available for the [ODA TV] trial, but they did not use them for the hearing.

As in Hasan’s example, security forces use special tactics to prevent reporting in the name of public health, the outcome of which is lack of recognition as a journalist, emotional fatigue, professional disrespect, and the absence of factual reporting in mainstream news media. The securitization of journalism was even more severely felt in Eastern Turkey, a region with a long history of political violence. Working for an international media outlet in the Kurdish majority city of Diyarbakır, Murat (aged 47) compared the pandemic measures to those taken after the intense conflicts in 2015 following the collapse of the Peace Process:

The previously removed checkpoints returned during the pandemic. You are stopped by the police every few meters. They make announcements and take your temperature. We experienced it five years ago and thought this was over. Now they were implemented due to the pandemic, and you cannot object to them. If you say something, they say ‘we do it for health’ . . . The only difference from 2015 was the lack of gunfire. And yet, the same scene. . . Empty streets that create emotional despair. . .

What causes a journalist to make connections between an extremely violent period of recent political history and the current pandemic in terms of their affective atmosphere? Murat points to arbitrariness as it deepens his political precarity as a journalist because his ability to report is obstructed by the moral justification of sacrifice in the name of public health. “We do it for health” rationalizes the limitation of freedom to work and journalistic autonomy, while reminding him of the politically violent days of 2015.

Despite obstacles in the field or in meeting rooms, journalists nevertheless continued to pose questions because when the pandemic was still in its early stages, the Health Ministry strategically invited journalists across the political spectrum to its press meetings. For Yasemin (aged 43), an experienced political reporter from Ankara who also covered health related issues during the pandemic, this was a strategic move. She claimed that the government “realized that the media outlets that use social media effectively and are followed by the public are the ones outside of their control.” That is, the government was “not concerned about press freedom but wanted official messages to spread and be accepted.” Though journalists asked critical questions in these press meetings, they were soon inundated with pro-government journalists. For Yasemin, the goal was to limit airtime given to critical journalists:

When they [pro-government journalists] joined in, we couldn’t direct our questions since they were asking theirs. . . There was a time limit, meaning that the number of questions that could be asked was also limited. We started to see that one of the advisers [of the minister] constantly intervened to decide who was going to ask the next question.

Burak, a young reporter working for an independent web-based news outlet, confirmed Yasemin’s account. The arrival of pro-government journalists prevented them from asking their questions as early as the end of April 2020:

One of the press advisers of the Health Minister said ‘we will only take eight questions.’ When we asked why, she replied that because news channels broadcast live, they would not be able to break for commercials as planned if the press meeting was prolonged. We said, ‘if the ordering of questions is like you said, that is—first agencies, then TV channels, newspapers, and Internet sites, the [reporters of] Internet sites will never be able to ask questions. You realize this, don’t you?’. . . After 2-3 occasions, we could not ask any questions.

The inability to ask questions in these meetings soon produced tensions and caused real repercussions for journalists, some of whom would be excluded from communication channels. Öykü, a young news outlet reporter with a critical stance toward government policies, was not given the floor for three successive meetings. When she once bypassed advisors to directly ask a critical question to the Minister, Health Ministry officials did not give her the floor in the following meetings, offering the pretext of lack of time. In one of these press briefings, she shared her question with the officials, who told her that because the question concerned another state official, the Minister would not take the question. In response, she circulated her question through social media because she was tired of rejections. This did not go unpunished. She was later removed from the Ministry’s text messaging group without explanation. When asked why the Ministry’s initially inclusive attitude to critical journalists had changed, she replied:

People learned about different examples from around the world, looking at the conditions in hospitals, [asking] why there was no vaccine, seeing that political congresses [of the ruling party] were still going on while they as ordinary citizens obeyed the lockdown. These questions were asked to the Minister, which was not expected.

Denial of professional space and removal from a professional text messaging group attests to Öykü’s and other journalists’ political precarity defined by the government arbitrarily deciding who is authorized to report and ask questions about the politics of pandemic management. A fragile border exists between reporting and censorship, dismissal, and at times prosecution, revealing that the state can switch from its performance of a welcoming state to that of a punishing state at any moment.

Apart from inundating meetings with pro-government journalists, preventing critical journalists from asking questions, and constantly promising journalists the opportunity to ask questions in later meetings, the government had other tactics to throttle information flows. One was to keep information in small circles and not share it with the Scientific Advisory Board, to which journalists had relatively easier access. While the government would claim to base its pandemic regulations on the advice they received from the board, board members would tell reporters that they were not given any information at all in certain cases, as Ayşe, working at a mainstream news channel, reported:

The Health Minister once made a statement at midnight when new case numbers peaked. I forwarded this to a doctor on the Scientific Advisory Board and he said, ‘I just learned about this.’ . . . That is to say, they also are not informed about the data; they are also kept out of the loop. [The data] circulates in a small circle, and as journalists, we cannot access that circle.

The government used numerous other tactics to throttle information, such as keeping journalists waiting, changing press meeting times, reducing the number of weekly press meetings, foregrounding the discourse of national interests when they faced criticism, and excluding dissident professional associations from the governance of the pandemic. These different modes in which political precarity is induced matter, but journalists especially complained about red tape or how government functionaries treated them. In some cases, local bureaucrats intimidated them. Mustafa claimed that the governor, the top local authority, directly instructed the local press not to report about local Covid case numbers:

For a period of time, conflicting numbers about the number of cases were reported by the media. The governor’s office immediately said, ‘case numbers will not be covered. Speculations disturb the people, and if you continue like this, a criminal investigation will be conducted.’

In sum, the government used the pandemic to limit journalists’ freedom of speech and deepen their political precarity. Security forces aimed to physically obstruct critical reporters from doing their work, while the Health Ministry and state bureaucracy mobilized various tactics to throttle information flows. Because the government would arbitrarily mobilize discourses of “public health,” journalists’ political precarity in which they were not able to perform their jobs intensified. Responding to such tactics used in the field and across bureaucratic spaces is a violent and emotionally draining process for journalists, who find themselves to be politically precarious subjects because their working capacities and professional worth are eroded.

Conclusion

If Covid-19 is “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next,” as suggested by Indian novelist Roy (2020), the future that the Turkish government imagined for the nation’s journalists is not the brightest. First, economic precarity has especially deepened for freelance, local and young reporters. Second, journalists’ bodies have become vulnerable to infection, isolation, and stigmatization. Third, we diagnose an ontological condition of what we call political precarity, meaning that journalists are structurally barred from being able to physically practice their profession and speak political truth to power. Journalists’ professional and bodily worth and their capacity to work are arbitrarily defined by an authoritarian government and its necropolitical logic. Although being a journalist in Turkey has historically meant precarity, the pandemic has surely functioned “as a perfect storm of old stories and new orientations” (Puar, 2012: 166), intensifying old patterns of economic inequality and producing new political frameworks within which journalism could be practiced. In the name of public health and national security, the government invests in the “tactical distribution of precarity” (Puar, 2012: 170), where some journalists are hit harder than others. These multiple dimensions of precarity dewesternize the notion of precarity with a distinct focus on the body and politics, rescuing the term from its techno-economistic accounts.

Finally, although we analytically distinguish between economic, bodily, and political precarity, we are also aware that the categories are not neatly separable because while lack of economic resources have an immediate impact on journalists’ livelihoods, it also shapes the political investment a journalist might be willing to make in professional or workplace struggles. Similarly, the bodily safety and emotional well-being of a journalist invariably parallels how secure a journalist feels politically. If journalism is a profession based on “the right to produce news and inform the people,” as freelance photojournalist Dilek claimed, this right is surely shaped by one’s economic, bodily, and political capacities. The recuperation of these capacities lies in a multifaceted struggle that not only demands economic rights, workplace safety, and political freedom, but also recognizes how the precarious lives of journalists are all interdependent on each other in that if one is not thriving, the profession probably won’t, either.