The Structural Problem of Media Freedom and Conspiracies

 
Turkish journalists are used to being singled out and attacked by President Erdogan.  But more recently Turkey's top political leadership has turned its conspiracy-prone gaze to international circles. Dozens of columnists in the Turkish media have lost their jobs because of political pressure coming from Erdogan and the AKP. To be sure, the tools used to pressure and control media outlets and individual journalists existed before Erdogan's AKP came to power. In that sense, the Turkish media was never truly independent.  But Erdogan, with his extraordinary political dominance, has exerted his influence unapologetically and with increasing frequency and force. The situation went from bad to worse as the number of reporters, editors, and broadcasters fired increased substantially in the wake of Gezi protests during the summer of 2013. According to the Turkish Journalists’ Union 59 journalists had been fired or forced out. The opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has compiled a list of 77 journalists who were fired or forced out due to their coverage of the protests. NTV Tarih, a history magazine owned by NTV, was shut down entirely and its staff let go after the magazine’s editors prepared a special “Gezi edition.”
 
A large part of the absence of media independence problem in Turkey is structural. Most Turkish media bosses are owners of large conglomerates who use their media enterprises as a conduit for lucrative government contracts.   This makes them particularly vulnerable to governmental pressure.  The role of public tenders and privatization in maintaining government influence over media cannot be overstated. The prime minister’s office controls billions of dollars in projects per year as the chair of the Privatization High Council. The PM has final say over privatization approvals, creating a clear incentive for diversified holding companies to avoid all conflict with his office. An even larger amount of money flows through the public procurement process. 
 
In 2012, the government issued $46.2 billion worth of contracts, with key holding companies with media outlets eagerly bidding. As a recent Freedom House report on the state of the Turkish media puts it : "The result is an atmosphere of complicity, censorship, and outright stenography on the part of a large segment of the media."  It is no longer unusual for multiple newspapers to run the same headline when the political stakes are particularly high. For instance in November 2013, during a very public rift between Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc and Prime Minister Erdogan six newspapers ran near-identical headlines quoting the prime minister playing down the feud: “We will solve it amongst ourselves” is what readers saw when they picked up their papers.
 
Almost every holding company with interests in the media sector benefits from government contracts. The following are only select examples: Doguş Holding (NTV, StarTV) won a $702 million bid in May 2013 to operate Istanbul’s Galataport in Karakoy. In November, Ihlas Holding (Türkiye, Ihlas News Agency, TGRT TV)   signed a $1.86 billion deal to redevelop Istanbul’s Gaziosmanpasa neighborhood. The Demiroren Group, whose Milangaz subsidiary is one of the country’s liquefied petroleum gas giants and which built the controversial Demiroren shopping center on Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue, bought Milliyet and Vatan from Dogan Holding in 2011. According to Erdogan himself, the company’s owner, Mr. Demiroren asked the prime minister for his recommendation for editor in chief of Milliyet after buying the paper. This was hardly surprising since a critical voice  or a critical story can easily jeopardize multi-million dollar bids for government tenders. When Milliyet Columnist Hasan Cemal, one  of Turkey’s most respected journalists – and the President of P24 – defended his paper’s decision to publish leaked information about PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s attitudes toward peace talks, the prime minister attacked Cemal, saying, “If this is journalism, then down with your journalism!”. Not surprisingly, shortly after this incident the chief editor of the newspaper fired Hasan Cemal.
 
Ownership of a pro-government media outlet is not a particularly profitable business per se. As a result, many owners of powerful holding companies regard media properties as a burden rather than a privilege—a levy that must be paid to ensure continued access to government contracts. According to Freedom House an increasingly common phenomenon is a game of “pass the can,” where holding companies bear the cost of running a pro-government media group for a time and then try to transfer ownership to another beneficiary of government favor as quickly as circumstances allow.
 
Having subdued and silenced the domestic media, President Erdogan in recent months has directed his ire against international media outlets. In September, Erdogan and his supporters in the pro-government media denounced The New York Times and one of its Istanbul correspondents with growing anger. They reacted to an article and photograph about the recruitment of fighters in Turkey by the Islamic State, the militant group that has seized parts of neighboring Iraq and Syria.  Newspapers controlled by allies of the president, published front-page photographs of the NYT correspondent Ceylan Yeginsu, and suggested she was a traitor and a foreign agent. Her motive, they said, was to malign Erdogan in a “perception operation” by insinuating that he is a closet supporter of the Islamic State, a group that Turkey, along with the United States and many other countries, classifies as a terrorist threat. Erdogan called the story “despicable, vile and shameless,” contending it implied a connection between the Turkish government and the Islamic State.
 
Despite protests by the NYT and press-freedom advocates such as P24, the denunciations have turned personal, punctuated by threats conveyed via email and social media against the correspondent, Ceylan Yeginsu. It was the photograph in particular, which showed President Erdogan visiting a mosque in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, that appeared to be the catalyst for the backlash against The New York Times and Ms. Yeginsu. The photograph posted on the newspaper’s website was promptly removed after Mr. Erdogan complained and the NYT published a correction asserting that editors had erred in using it. The newspaper's executive editor, Dean Baquet, issued a statement that the article never said or implied that Mr. Erdogan supported the Islamic State or condoned the group’s recruitment in Turkey, and that the photograph also was not meant to imply such support.
 
In an earlier incident in August 2014, Erdogan denounced Amberin Zaman, the local correspondent for The Economist, as “a shameless militant disguised under the name of a journalist” and told " to know her place." Other journalists criticized by Mr. Erdogan and pro-government newspapers in the past year include Ivan Watson of CNN International and Selin Girit and Rengin Arslan of the BBC.
 
Such lack of tolerance for criticism is usually a symptom of weakness. It is normally easier to show tolerance for criticism when you are powerful. That the current government in Turkey is the most stable and powerful in recent history thus constitutes a paradox.  The AKP has won three consecutive elections in the last 12 years. The party also won the March 2014  local elections with a much wider margin than predicted and Erdogan won the presidential election in August with more than 51 percent of the votes. No one doubts his party will also win the next parliamentary elections in 2015.  The Turkish opposition is in disarray and the traditionally very influential and meddlesome secularist military has been totally emasculated. The AKP is by all definitions a powerful government with a strong social base.
 
Why is there such intolerance when Erdogan and the AKP are so powerful? To answer this paradox one needs to focus on Erdogan’s winning strategy based on a narrative of victimhood. Despite winning elections after elections, Erdogan is still the master of playing the victim against powerful external forces. His populist and opportunistic political discourse of victimhood is a major part of Erdogan’s winning strategy. The narrative of victimhood pays off in the ballot box because the Turkish people love the underdog. To portray himself as the helpless underdog facing powerful external forces, Erdogan needs to engage in three simultaneous tactics.
 
First he has to avoid self-criticism at all costs. This is why Erdogan reacts with anger and fury to all kinds of criticism.  After reacting to critics with sharp intolerance, in stage two, Erdogan excels in conspiracy theories. This is logical.  If he is not at fault, it certainly must be the fault of others.  This is crucial because the minute Erdogan accepts blame or shows tolerance for critics his winning strategy would collapse. He therefore needs to blame others.
In his conspiracy-prone worldview which resonates with large segments of society, the ones to blame are often the usual suspects:  The US, Israel, Jews and lately the international media outlets and even economic rating agencies. The most predictable third stage is to wax poetic about victimhood and the pledge to never back down against these powerful enemies. All these dynamics should help us understand why a powerful Erdogan has vested interest in showing no tolerance of criticism. His winning strategy of victimhood in the face of conspiracy theories depends on it.  Such political leadership combined with the structural problems of media ownership easily manipulates Turkish public opinion. Under such circumstances media independence and an objective view of the Western world are bound to stay absent in a country that is often seen as the most democratic in the Muslim world.

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