Requiem for a newspaper

 Requiem
 
“Support for independent journalism in Turkey” is what it says on P24’s label, so it is with some embarrassment we report our failure to do precisely that. We only woke up to Karşı’s existence by the time it was too late. This was a brand new title on the Turkish newsstands and, alas, it seems to have attracted attention largely by the brevity of its life and the painfulness of its demise. 
 
“Karşı” is a clever name. It means “against”, and apart from striking a contrarian note, rhymes with “çarşı,” the proud label of the Beşiktaş football team supporters club whose members were at the core of last year’s protests to protect Istanbul’s Gezi Park. “Different from everyone else, eclectic… quasi-investigative with an edgy tone,” is how one friend lamented its closure. Others have been less kind– but you can make up your own minds. Although it ceased to publish after only two months, Karşı’s ghost still haunts cyberspace as a website.
 
That website contains a slightly bitter interview with the paper’s owner, Turan Ababay. In it, he laments the brief occupation of the paper’s offices by employees waiting to be paid. It was always his intention to honour their severance pay, he says in the quoted transcript of an interview for +1 Television. And he remonstrates both against the way the pro-government media tried to brand the paper as an instrument of the Fethullah Gülen movement and how advertisers were scared away as a result. At the same time he wonders whether he was right to accept an ad from a construction tycoon for developments that pave over the remaining green spaces of Istanbul.
 
It is the testimony of a man who eases himself into the kiddies’ end of the swimming pool only to find himself in a swirling vortex over his head. The same article contains the remarks of employees who, to strike up another metaphor, felt they were conned into signing up to work on the Titanic.
 
As P24 we sympathise with those who pay a price for good intentions and feel concern that Mr Ababay now faces a mountain of debt. Was he a Pied Piper, luring young writers to their doom to the siren song of journalistic independence or a tragic hero daring the impossible? The challenge he faced is still unresolved: how to provide a sustainable business model for a dissenting voice.
 
Compare Karşı to pro-government publications which benefit from large corporate backers. Star newspaper, once in the hands of the AKP’s fiercest enemy, is now owned by SOCAR, the Azerbaijan state oil company. It has become the government’s closest ally. The history of the Sabah is equally telling. It was taken into public ownership after the collapse of its owner’s bank in the 2000-2001 economic crisis, then in 2008 it was sold off to the Çalık Group, a conglomerate in which the prime minister’s son-in-law was the CEO . Two state-owned banks lent $750 million for the $1.25 billion acquisition of the media of which Sabah was the flagship. Even then, Calık was eager to sell its media interests which incurred some $200 million worth of losses, according to a Bloomberg investigative report. The buyers were the members of the consortium that who won the $29 billion tender for a third Istanbul airport. If the recent spate of leaked phone conversations are to be taken seriously, the new owners had no desire to invest in media but were frogmarched into doing so as part of that deal.
 
In 1985 Sabah’s founder in 1985 used the influence of his paper to leverage his way into other businesses, including banking which he little understood. Today, ownership of newspapers has become a sort of tax– the levy its new proprietors must pay to win lucrative public contracts.
 
In such circumstances, the search for media independence in Turkey is becoming an alchemists’ quest. And in such circumstances, the best we can say to Karşi is R.I.P. With its demise, we all die a little.