Abstract
Latest election results in Turkey suggest the mood may be changing in a country that has engaged in systematic repression of journalists
A political earthquake occurred this June in Turkey as the opposition candidate Ekram İmamoğlu won mayoral elections in Istanbul, ending 25 years of dominance in the city by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP party. The victory was, in fact, İmamoğlu's second within four months, after election authorities overturned his initial victory in March following a spurious challenge by the AKP. That challenge backfired spectacularly on the AKP, whose candidate, former prime minister Binali Yıldırım, lost the June re-run by around 10 percentage points.
İmamoğlu's win for the main opposition party CHP was remarkable, given the uneven playing field. The AKP party controls an estimated 90 per cent of Turkey's media through a network of Erdoğan-friendly media owners that has grown massively over the past several years. The biggest blow came last year, when a businessman close to the government purchased the Doğan group, which controls some of Turkey's most influential mainstream media outlets, including the daily Hürriyet. In other cases, critical media have simply been shut down – more than 140 print, television, radio and web outlets have been forcibly closed since the July 2016 coup attempt, according to research by the International Press Institute (IPI), a global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists for press freedom.
At the same time, the government has sought to criminalise criticism of its leaders and policies, generating a widespread climate of fear. There are currently 135 journalists behind bars in Turkey, while scores more have faced criminal prosecution, mostly on the basis of defamation and anti-terror charges whose sheer absurdity would be laughable if it weren't for the deeply serious personal and societal consequences they bear. The authorities’ equation of critical reporting with terrorism and the accompanying gross abridgement of basic due process rights – endless pre-trial detention, lack of coherent indictments, and egregious violations of the right to a fair trial, including access to counsel and the right to appear personally before a judge – have created ideal conditions for self-censorship.
The fact that İmamoğlu managed to secure victory despite highly unfair conditions certainly underscores, on the one hand, the level of public disenchantment with AKP rule, under whose watch Turkey has slipped into a deep economic crisis, spurred on by Erdoğan's appointing of loyalists rather than independent experts to manage the country's finances. On the other hand, it also highlights the courage and dedication of Turkey's journalists in continuing to comment and publish critically on the government's policies, through the handful of independent media and news sites still in existence in Turkey as well as through social media, mainly Twitter, the political debate platform of choice in the country.
What does İmamoğlu's victory mean for the future of press freedom and independent journalism in Turkey? For those who have borne the brunt of the AKP's crackdown over the past three years, the change in administration is a welcome sign of hope. “The new context in Turkey makes us hopeful that a democratic exit is not just a possibility but a probability,” Kadri Gürsel, a highly regarded columnist and IPI executive board member who spent 11 months in prison between 2016 and 2017, said in July.
İmamoğlu himself committed to working with IPI to create the conditions for independent journalism to flourish in Turkey during a meeting with an IPI delegation at his office in July. “Both journalists and the local administration have the responsibility to defend press freedom and improve the quality of journalism,” he told IPI. “We carry the responsibility on our shoulders, not only for the people of Turkey, but for the whole world that believes in democracy.”
Although the seat of political power in Turkey remains in Erdoğan's sultanesque palace, local administrations in Turkey can play a key role in alleviating the economic threats to independent media in Turkey. The March municipal elections saw the opposition CHP wrest control not only of Istanbul, but also the capital, Ankara, and several other municipalities from the grip of the AKP, which had used its control of purse strings to funnel state advertising to government-friendly media outlets. This practice drained critical media, especially local outlets, of an essential source of financing. In parallel, the party used its influence to deter private advertisers from doing business with independent media and to keep the pro-government press firmly in line. “Pro-government publishers care little about the economic sustainability of their media outlets, as they rely solely on public tenders that the government awards them for their favourable coverage in other areas of business where they have interests,” journalist Emre Kızılkaya wrote in a report on the future of quality journalism in Turkey published by IPI last month.
In seizing control of Istanbul, Turkey's wealthy commercial capital of 16 million, and other municipalities, the CHP has an opportunity to provide support to independent news media based on principles of independence, fairness, transparency and pluralism. That system, IPI told leading CHP officials last month, should be designed not to support CHP party interests but rather the public interest. Newly elected leaders need to put in place lasting structures that will shield the media and other democratic institutions, especially the courts, from future political meddling by any political party.
Reversing the crackdown starts with the young
In truth, however, reversing Erdoğan's media freedom crackdown goes beyond rooting out a rotten system of political patronage or even freeing the dozens of journalists behind bars and ending the campaign of political and legal harassment, necessary as these steps obviously are. The years of authoritarian-minded rule in Turkey have wreaked havoc on the profession of journalism, leaving the media industry in some ways ill-prepared for the demands of a public hungry for quality, critical journalism after a long propaganda exile.
The situation is worst for Turkey's young journalists, who have not only faced the prospect of a career defined by censorship and unemployment, but who have also been woefully underserved by Turkey's educational system. Kızılkaya's report on the future of quality journalism in Turkey conducted in-depth interviews and focus groups with 67 students from across the country. The results were highly troubling: interviewees reported a widespread failure of university journalism departments to provide students with the skills needed to meet the demands of modern journalism – especially changing technologies – as well as instil values of critical thinking. “Our journalism school failed to transform the students to give them an analytical and social mindset,” one student said, while another reported that university officials actively censored the student newspaper and “turned it into a PR outlet”, mirroring the national trend.
At the local level, the corruption of the media landscape by the state and government-friendly owners has accelerated the economic travails of local media, giving rise to “news deserts” across the country. The decimation of local media is so complete that it has not even spared outlets that toed the line to continue receiving state financial benefits – the financial pressures are simply too overwhelming. Kızılkaya found that the local media crisis has only served to reinforce the challenge for young journalists. “The lack of local media outlets and the weak presence of national ones in local communities is bad news not only for journalists in these regions, but also for students who struggle to find a prospective employer or an internship opportunity that can foster their skills,” he wrote.
Against this backdrop, while political change is clearly a necessary condition for reviving quality journalism in Turkey, it alone will not suffice. Massive investment is needed to fix the damage done by years of neglect and prepare a new generation of journalists capable of producing critical, public interest news for their communities.
Based on his conversations with students and local media representatives, Kızılkaya, a former editor and digital coordinator with Hürriyet and a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard, offered a number of proposals to get journalism off the ground again in Turkey, focusing on the young journalists who will shape its future.
“Journalism students are the most effective starting point for strengthening Turkey's emerging journalistic community. Any such effort should begin by supporting them, particularly their understanding of what constitutes quality journalism, as well as their capacity to create it,” he wrote.
The recommended initiatives include: an open source curriculum, organised as a massive open online course, for journalists with a focus on modern techniques such as multimedia storytelling and data journalism, as well as on journalistic business models; public spaces and community-driven “creative cafés” to allow journalists to collaborate, share skills and engage with audiences and stakeholders; a programme to map trusted media outlets in the country; incubator and accelerator programmes to disrupt Turkey's “dysfunctional” media; an international internship programme for journalism students in Turkey to acquire better experience of how quality journalism is practised abroad; and a new award to incentivise good, critical reporting.
All of these, and other, initiatives require time and the involvement of a range of stakeholders, as well as significant investment. But such a comprehensive renewal of journalism is essential for the future of Turkey's democracy. To be sure, the political situation in Turkey has offered the first concrete shimmer of hope of a return to democracy and the rule of law after years of erosion. Nevertheless, the duration and depth of the attacks on journalism in recent years – not simply the high-profile jailings and criminalisation of expression, but also the systematic undermining of the independent press's economic viability – has caused damage, and ending the crackdown itself will not be enough.
Among the most inspiring findings of Kızılkaya's report was that, despite the censorship and lack of job opportunities, the journalism students he surveyed had not lost their interest in the profession. The vast majority said they would stick with journalism despite the challenges and frustrations. The time is ripe to build on this optimism and enduring belief.
