As we ‘’celebrate’’ the World Press Freedom Day

The conditions under which journalists now labor in Turkey worsen day by day to such an extent that that the country now risks having a total blackout on public debate.
 
Punitive measures and harsh restrictions increase geometrically so that the space left for independent journalism, and media pluralism is in danger of disappearing all together.
 
This is not just the opinion of Turkish journalists. In its latest World Press Freedom Index, scrutinizing media in 180 countries, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Turkey as #151, marking yet another fall, this time with two points.
 
''President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has embarked on an offensive against Turkey’s media. Journalists are harassed, many have been accused of 'insulting the president' and the Internet is systematically censored'' said RSF in its findings.
 
The decline was found to be even more dramatic in the annual Freedom of the Press 2016 survey by Freedom House. Its survey over the past year marked a fall by six points, placing Turkey as 156th among 199 countries, again among those as 'not free'.
 
''The government, controlled by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), aggressively used the penal code, criminal defamation legislation, and the country’s antiterrorism law to punish critical reporting, and journalists faced growing violence, harassment, and intimidation from both state and nonstate actors during the year. The authorities continued to use financial and administrative leverage over media owners to influence coverage and silence dissent,'' it concluded.
 
The country's remnant core of brave and independent journalists, are in one mind, regardless of political color, now that, this all-has resulted in a sector at the mercy of political and bureaucratic power.  Many of their colleagues are mere stenographers for those powers or agents of propaganda.
 
Those who resist are persecuted mercilessly. Legal investigations into journalists are on the rise. According to the Ministry of Justice, there have been are over 1800 prosecutions for 'insulting the President' since mid 2014.
 
In other cases, the charges are more serious. The editors of Cumhuriyet daily, Dündar and Erdem Gül are accused of spying and treason, over a story that the government organized secret convoys to smuggle weapons, allegedly to Syrian jihadist groups.
 
In another notorious case, Mehmet Baransu, an investigating journalist, has been kept in detention for over 13 months, on charges so secret that his own lawyers have been kept in the dark.
 
In two very recent cases, senior journalists from Cumhuriyet, Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Çetinkaya, were sentenced to two years of prison each for ‘’inciting hatred.’’ Their ‘’crime’’ was to reprint a Charlie Hebdo front page cartoon in their column, which they said was an act of professional solidarity.
 
According to the Bianet monitoring site, there are now 28 journalists in Turkish prisons, many of whom are affiliated with the Kurdish media, based on charges mainly by Anti-Terror Law.
 
The increasingly draconian nature of charges and prison sentences leave little doubt about AKP government's intent to criminalize that journalism which it cannot control.
 
Punitive measures against journalism go far beyond court cases. The most efficient method has proven to be to have journalists, who insist on exercising basic standards of the profession, fired.
 
The number of those dismissed since the mid-year Gezi Park protests of 2013 has reached 3,500. This is the result of pressures applied by the government circles on media moguls who, compromised by lucrative public contracts, are all too eager to abide by ‘’instructions.’’ The employers are emboldened by the virtual absence of the trade unions (membership among journalists is below 4 %) to sack staff arbitrarily.
 
As a result, the conglomerate-dominated mainstream media newsrooms have turned into ‘’open-air prisons,’’ where self-censorship in Turkey has become a deeply rooted part of culture. On top of this, there are 'blacklists' of TV pundits and opinion writers who are banned for their critical stance on all sides of the political spectrum.
 
What apparently weighed heavy in the gloomy ranking figures by RSF and FH is the fact that, from early last year, authorities started also targeting large, private media institutions, known for critical journalism.
 
Hürriyet, an influential newspaper belonging to Doğan Media was attacked by a mob two nights in a row last summer, after which its owners felt they had to 'tone down' critical content to a minimum.
 
In even more dramatic cases, Koza-Ipek Media outlets last autumn were raided by the police, followed some months after by a similar large-scale operation against Zaman Media, second largest group in the sector, and the largest independent news agency, CHA.
 
Theses seizures, along with some other critical channels plugged off from satellite and digital platforms in the recent months, left a huge vacuum, threatening to terminate the diversity of the media.
 
Now, with around 90 % of the sector under direct or indirect editorial control of the AKP government, including the state broadcaster TRT, there are only three critical TV channels and no more than five small-size independent newspapers left.
 
As a result of the full-frontal assaults, two consequences are more than apparent.
 
Investigative journalism is blocked, news are severely filtered. Second, with diversity fading out, public debate –key element for any democracy— is severely limited.
 
Along with routine publicity bans on specific events such as terror attacks, severe accreditation restrictions and, as a new pattern emerging, deportation of correspondents of the international media, the conclusion is inevitable.
 
A profession faces extinction and along with its exit, there will be a thick wall between the truth and the public, both domestic and international. This total eclipse will have far deeper consequences than anyone can imagine.