“Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Have We Ever Been Free?”

The Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) held the eleventh annual conference organized in memory of journalist Mehmet Ali Birand on May 3, World Press Freedom Day.

This year’s lecture was delivered by Tuğrul Eryılmaz, a veteran of the industry known for his role as the editor of Radikal İki, the highly regarded culture and opinion supplement of the Radikal newspaper until it ceased publication in 2013. Eryılmaz’s career spans back to his days as a foreign news reporter at the public broadcaster TRT in 1974. 2024 marked his fiftieth year in journalism. 

Eryılmaz, who has also taught journalism at various universities throughout his professional career, is respected by many for the standards he sets and defends. Eryılmaz represents the epitome of journalism as a craft, and the lecture “Yesterday, today, tomorrow… Have we ever been free?” discussed the many breaking points and the future of Turkish media, touching on topics such as the role of social media, the impact of political pressure, and the importance of journalistic ethics.

“There never is real freedom. It is just a case of instinctively discovering how close you can approach the fire before you get burned, of developing those reflexes peculiar to journalists in wounded democracies,” Eryılmaz said, reflecting on the challenges faced by Turkish media over the past five decades. “And the result? Years pass without you ever feeling free; your every success is just a means to overcome the next obstacle.”

Tuğrul Eryılmaz

Eryılmaz also engaged in a much-needed exercise of self-criticism. “With the exception of Sokak magazine, I have had to perform throughout my life in every publication I managed or published, a balancing act in choosing which news to report. If we happened to report on Kurds or Armenians for three weeks in a row, I would refrain for the next two weeks. Otherwise, the consequences myself and my team would suffer from such persistence was very clear,” Eryılmaz said. He concluded with a powerful call to return to the basics – editorial standards and journalistic ethics. “Those of us who accept being called journalists must not give up standing up for our profession. Otherwise, as has become the fate of mainstream broadcast media opposition locked in a cycle of passing off commentary for reporting, of turning every other sentence into a slogan, and seeing themselves in the shoes of policymakers, we will find ourselves still believing we are practicing journalism.”

Before Eryılmaz’s lecture, Fatoş Erdoğan, a woman journalist, shared her experiences reporting from the streets. For years, she has covered almost every public protest, demonstration, or rally, often finding herself in the midst of confrontations with police. Erdoğan’s testimony addressed police brutality, both physical and psychological, highlighting the unique challenges faced by women journalists in the field. 

Fatoş Erdoğan

Mehmet Ali Birand’s son, Umur Birand, who is working tirelessly to keep his father’s legacy alive for the next generation of journalists, welcomed the speakers and guests. His dedication to preserving his father’s values and principles is a testament to the enduring impact of Mehmet Ali Birand’s work.

In a welcoming speech, veteran journalist and P24 co-founder Andrew Finkel stressed the media’s responsibility to hold itself accountable to higher standards. “We cannot expect society, let alone the government, to rush to the defense of a journalistic profession when the media itself has been so careless in defending its own profession and its own rights,” Finkel said.

Umur Birand

Andrew Finkel

The lecture was hosted by the Kıraathane Istanbul Literature House.

You can read below the full text of P24’s eleventh Annual Mehmet Ali Birand Lecture delivered by Tuğrul Eryılmaz:

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow… Have We Ever Been Free?

H. Tuğrul Eryılmaz

I first discovered newspapers in Diyarbakır. My father, who was in the civil service, had been assigned there, and, as the oldest child in the family, it was my responsibility to go every day to buy him a Cumhuriyet newspaper. In those days, newspapers printed in Istanbul were delivered to what we used to call the provinces the next day. So, while people followed agency news on the (state run) TRT radio closely and knew what was going on, they bought a day-old newspaper all the same. Later, when we moved to İzmir, I became acquainted with the Doğan Kardeş magazine. Doğan Kardeş was meant for me and not for my father. My teacher Nerime Doğrul had introduced us to the magazine which would publish children’s stories like Swords of Ice (Buzdan Kılıçlar) and Silver Skates (Beyaz Patenler), but that was pretty much it.

Once in Izmir, my father’s taste in newspapers began to branch out. Izmir was a developed city, and it had its own local press. The newspaper Demokrat İzmir joined Cumhuriyet in the roster. It was a leftist newspaper and, to be honest, its reporting was not all that good. Finally, my father gave in and added the more colourful Yeni Asır to the existing two. So, I bought three newspapers every day to take home. You know how some people tell you they never wanted to become anything other than a journalist? Well, I never thought about journalism or becoming a journalist, despite growing up surrounded by dailies. I didn’t even know anyone who wanted to become a journalist.

If I may digress, sometimes I feel quite strange when talking about the history of journalism. Because what I’m talking about is not the history of journalism but my own past. It must have something to do with ageing, or growing older that it seems as one talks about history, one becomes history.

When I think back to my years at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Ankara, I remember how we leftist young people used to strut in the cafeteria with copies of Cumhuriyet under our arms, the crisp winds of the year 1968 blowing overhead. Despite reading the newspaper carefully, none of us thought “let’s become journalists.” With the winds of freedom of 1968 at our backs, we all had much greater ambitions.

Let me leave aside the winds of 1968 and return to the subject of journalism. I think I decided to become a journalist out of necessity. I barely managed to return from London, where I had gone to study for a doctorate, to my mother’s house in Izmir with 30 pounds to my name. As I brooded over what to do next, I saw an announcement in the newspaper for the TRT central news desk exam. I took it eagerly. At the time, İsmail Cem was the Director General of the TRT. I entered the foreign news service as a translator and reporter. There were people like Esin Talu Çelikkan, Cevat Taylan and Aycan Giritlioğlu in the jury. The room where I started to work was filled to the brim with graduates of the Faculty of Political Sciences. Andaç Develi, Reha Atasagun, Füsün Suvari Baytok, Hale Ebiri… For the first few months I was an unpaid intern and as I had already gone through the 30 pounds, I stayed with my former leftist friends and survived this period because of their solidarity. I’m very happy that such solidarity is once more in vogue and is slowly being in action again.

Back then, the TRT tried to teach a style of reporting exemplified by the BBC. It included reporting impartially, writing short news items, using very proper Turkish and avoiding foreign words. The TRT was quite the school at the time. There were people such as Aycan Giritlioğlu, Necla Zarakol, Cafer Demiral and Ercan San in the newsroom. We got to work with such nice people and of course, we organized immediately, founding an association called TÜM-DER. I think it was only after those first few months and as I became more engaged with the work that I began to call myself a journalist, or at least to say, “I can do this job.” What’s interesting is that although I keep mentioning my leftist friends, there were plenty of rightists at the TRT. We didn’t get along but shared an interest in conveying the news correctly. Of course, this was the İsmail Cem period. With changes of government, the directors general kept changing as well and with that came changes in the approach to reporting. Things became gradually unbearable. To give you an example: They hated the names “People’s Liberation Front – or Army – of Vietnam” and insisted that we call it the “Vietcong.” We didn’t write Vietcong once, we always used the “People’s Liberation Front of Vietnam,” the “People’s Liberation Army of Vietnam.”

İsmail Cem was replaced by Nevzat Yalçıntaş as the Director General of the TRT and, after him, Şaban Karataş was appointed. Although most managers were right-wingers, at the time the rumour that “TRT is being controlled by leftists” was rife. A few years ago, I read somewhere that “the BBC has been controlled by the left for a thousand years.” Everywhere around the world, the right voices this same complaint. And yet, as a journalist, all you want to do is report honestly and to write about events the way they happened. Then as now, people on the right said, “No, you can’t write about it as it was, you have to think of the state, of the system.” And yet, we have no such duty! We never reached an understanding on this point. And this is still the cause of all the trouble. Some think that they are obliged to protect the state. No, what we are obliged to do is to convey the truth. I never believed in all that talk about the sanctity of professions, but if our profession does have a sacred tenet, it is to first and foremost to convey the truth. Once you have conveyed the truth, you may comment on it as you will. But first convey the truth.

I was still at TRT in 1977. The immediate impact of the 12 March 1971 military memorandum had passed, but Nationalist Front governments were in power. Since we first had Nevzat Yalçıntaş and then Şaban Karataş as the directors general, we remember that period at TRT as one in which it did not so much rain as pour. The best of the chiefs and editors who were appointed to manage us would say “What can we do, people, just put up with it.” What were we to put up with though? We were to ignore some news and let some invented news get through. At the time, there was turmoil in Lebanon. The Christians were right-wing, and the Muslims were left-wing but we were forbidden from saying this. They would say “Why do you write it like this, change it, just say Christians and Muslims”.

In Turkey, the right has always had a problem with the truth. We made a mistake though; we did not erect a barrier against them, we just tried to take the right stance individually. But as we tried to do the right thing without making common cause, as a group we lost much ground. In any case, TRT was being captured by an incredibly militant group and there was not much left we could do.

Just as I had started calling myself a journalist and acknowledging that journalism was my chosen profession, there was a major shakeup at TRT. This destroyed the group known as leftists who had been recruited during the İsmail Cem period. Some of us were demoted and some of us of were let go. My second stop was the School of Press and Publications at the Faculty of Political Sciences. Although I earned a quarter of what I made at the TRT, I enjoyed my work immensely. I tried to teach my students what I had learned at the school that was TRT. Almost all my students were very bright. I taught many whom I later got to work with, and I was -generally- proud of them all. Can Dündar, Faruk Bildirici and Şule Çizmeci are just some of my students from back then.

During my years at the School of Press and Publications I never paid TRT a single visit, so oppressive was the period under the new directors general. Another digression: Many years later I was to lecture in journalism at Bilgi University and for ten years witnessed first-hand how the quality of students began gradually to fall. The concern was no longer journalism but to get a diploma. By the end, even someone as tenacious as myself gave up. Of course, there were some bright kids too over these ten years. However, to return to the School of Press and Publications, my happiness there was brief and was suddenly cut short by the coup of 12 September 1980. I think it was six months after the coup that I was dismissed along with many of my colleagues.

While we were thinking what do next, we received an offer from Ercan Arıklı, owner of Gelişim Publications in Istanbul, through Aycan Giritlioğlu. They wanted us (myself, Yazgülü Aldoğan, Nilgün Abisel, Nilay Karaelmas, and Uygur Kocabaşoğlu) to put their new and unpopular Nokta ve İnsanlar magazine into some sort of order. Arıklı told our group of journalists from Ankara “You will be free to do as you please,” and “I have called on you thinking that under current circumstances in Turkey, you will conduct the best opposition possible.” He knew very well how to reel us in, both economically and politically. I think he had a very good grasp of the difference between Ankara and Istanbul. Now, 45 years later, when I look back on my years of journalism in Ankara, I remember political journalism practiced by heavy hitters, even if I don’t recall their names. Arıklı asked only one thing of us, which was not to get his magazine shut down under articles 141 and 142 of the Turkish Penal Code. As you know, articles 141 and 142, which were in effect until 1991, prohibited “founding an organization which aims to establish the dominance of one social class over other social classes, to destroy a social class or to carry out propaganda to these ends.” And although we tackled many issues, ranging from sexuality to politics, and subjects which had up until then been considered taboo in Turkey, we succeeded in never getting the magazine shut down under articles 141 and 142.

Now, I would like to ask you: Is this an achievement? In a sense, yes, it is a significant achievement; but in another sense it remains an open professional wound. There never is real freedom. It is just a case of instinctively discovering how close you can approach the fire before you get burned, of developing those reflexes peculiar to journalists in wounded democracies. And the result? Years pass without you ever feeling free, your every success just a means to overcome the next obstacle.

I must accept that living and working in Istanbul after Ankara changed my life completely. First to change was our cultural life, which had swung between Ankara Art Theatre and the State Opera and Ballet. Istanbul had international concerts, exhibitions, events, and, of course, the cinema circle of Yeşilçam. You could even occasionally feel free in this city. But of course, sometimes you got phone calls you wouldn’t get in Ankara. I will never forget the time the chief executive of a then rising – later bust- bank calling me up at the Yeni Gündem magazine and threatening to bankrupt us if we did not pull out a news item. We went ahead with it and did not go bankrupt. And even though then prime minister Turgut Özal did not like us at all, there was never even a question of not being invited to any of his press conferences. I don’t know whether being classmates with Mesut Yılmaz at the Faculty of Political Sciences had anything to with it, but at the time to the very idea of a press conference from which some journalists could be barred was inconceivable. Today, such liberality appears incredible.

I could list many such examples, but none of them are intended to imply what heroes we were. We just did our jobs and stuck to it.

With the exception of Sokak magazine, I have had to perform throughout my life in every publication I managed or published, a balancing act in choosing which news to report. If we happened to report on Kurds or Armenians for three weeks in a row, I would refrain for the next two weeks. Otherwise, the consequences myself and my team would suffer from such persistence was very clear. For example, in 1996, when we reported in Radikal 2, such news for a few weeks on end, Aydın Doğan, who also owned Milliyet, Hürriyet and many TV networks told group manager Mehmet Yılmaz “Radikal 2 is like a ticking bomb.” No one told me not to report on such news, but Yılmaz cautioned me, saying “Tuğrul, you know the right dose.” Even today, when many people compliment me, saying “Radikal 2 was very good,” naturally many less happy aspects of the job come to my mind.

If you want to report the news in Turkey without getting banned, without having your publication confiscated off the shelves or without being fired, you have to have a good nose for the political climate and form your strategy accordingly. In today’s pool media, which has replaced the mainstream, news is prepared by a single source, so that particular skillset has become redundant. Yet still, to be able to practice our profession in Turkey, we have always had to meld the general rules of the profession to the specifics of the political atmosphere.

I must go into another minor digression here. Perhaps the only publication throughout my professional life where I felt free was Sokak magazine, which we started publishing in 1989. My friend Enver Nalbant provided the capital and said, “Do what you want!” The sword of articles 141 and 142 still hung above our heads and the ghost of 12 September still popped up from time to time, but we could publish an interview with Abdullah Öcalan, for example, with very little censorship. It was not just about daily politics either, for example we could publish news on the LGBT, a subject which at the time was taboo outside of a magazine context.

I would like to say a few words here about how I was personally perceived in the media. People in the mainstream media, as well as those in the left leaning media are all aware I’m not a bad journalist. The politest way they express this is: “That guy jumps in headfirst, but he is still a good journalist.” In time, I became a sort of last resort for the left-wing media. They would say, “Damn it, let’s get him. If anyone can do it, he can.” I first noticed I had such an image when I joined Yeni Gündem. When I escaped from İstanbul Yeni Asır to Yeni Gündem, the team was full of star journalists. They had all been in prison, either over the Dev-Yol or the THKP-C case, and they had all suffered as much as one could. I was dying of shame. I’ve been to a police station two times in my life, once to a court hearing, I was held in custody for at most 24 hours and I have never been in prison. It was clear they thought of me in strictly business terms and that they would provide the content, I would point out what was missing and what was too much, and we would thus produce the magazine. Murat Belge was the editor-in-chief and I was the deputy editor-in-chief, but after a while, Murat Belge became the general director and I become the editor-in-chief. I never got along with Murat Belge, we were never in sync. Yet, when I was an assistant at the university, in Ankara, I would spare no effort to attend Murat Belge’s conferences and seminars. He was a person I deeply respected and still is.

When I look back, I think the first turning point in media came from Sabah newspaper. Dinç Bilgin’s Sabah was always the trigger for merchandise wars in the media and the cutting back of journalists’ employee rights. Once again, I must digress. When I talk about the Sabah school of journalism, I don’t exempt myself from it. When Dinç Bilgin wanted to publish İstanbul Yeni Asır, after starting Sabah, they invited me to join. Güngör Mengi and Zafer Mutlu invited me, and I agreed on the condition that I only worked on the culture and the arts and magazine sections. I lasted a whole of three months. I retain a few mental images from those days. For example, it was at Yeni Asır that I first saw computers being used to produce newspapers at our premises in Mecidiyeköy. Yeni Asır had always seemed to me to be a colourless, bland newspaper. I was to produce all the society, culture and arts pages. We had Cafer Yarkent, who was educated in the U.S. to do page design. They paid good money, but somehow it still didn’t work. So, we would be preparing the proof, at three a.m. and they’d be waiting around to do the page design. They also had a chip on their shoulder about being from İzmir and not wanting to be overshadowed by people in Istanbul. It was nothing like Nokta, it was nothing like the TRT. You almost never saw people around. We would prepare the proofs and then they would take the news items we’d prepared from the computer with no permission and use them. I would find our reporting appearing in the İzmir Yeni Asır as though it was their own. How could one practice journalism this way?

Another memory I have is of Dinç Bilgin throwing the typewriter of a young woman journalist on the floor and shouting, “You will not use typewriters, pen, and paper here. We have technology now and you will use it.” I thought, “Good heavens. I can’t work here.” At the time they wanted me at Yeni Gündem. I simply went up to Güngör Mengi and told him I was leaving. I ran away from İstanbul Yeni Asır without looking back and, I think, without even receiving my final paycheck.

To come back to our subject, although media ownership was not yet becoming monopolized at the time and there was bad blood between owners. At the same time, other bosses were more than happy to adopt the changes introduced by Bilgin. The failure of senior managers, including managing editors, not to object or being afraid to object was very instrumental in this change. In journalism, when you take a single step outside professional boundaries, that is a very significant step. You find yourself on the other side of the table. You get invited to the boss’ house, you dine with the boss and the boss thinks you’re his child. I barely managed to get away from my own father so, God forbid, why would I want a new one? Unfortunately, this is how the rot set in. Colleagues who were supposed to be managing publications, saw themselves as bosses instead, and some of them even became members of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD). Once you have made that choice, yours is no longer the path of reporting, of journalism. You can only continue by pretending to be a journalist.

The second breaking point came with the entry of a businessperson with significant capital, Asil Nadir, into the media. Nadir upset many of the internal checks and balances and rendered them dysfunctional. Up until then, we had never heard of a chief editor making 25,000 dollars while a reporter made 1500. Even after Nadir went bankrupt, the disequilibrium never improved in favour of reporters and the hurt this caused never went away. To give another example from my own experiences: When I was at Radikal, I read in a media gossip outlet that I was supposed to be receiving a high salary. It was clear that my co-workers had also read that article. Of course, I was furious, and I posted my payslip on the wall without thinking. I think it stayed there for a week. Finally, Mehmet Yılmaz came up to me and said, “Take that down for God’s sake, we all get it,” so I took it down.

Another outcome of the Nadir episode was that businesspeople realized that they could do much better business as media owners. Today, the best example of this, as we all know, is the Demirören group. As capital ownership is changing hands, what we long regarded as great institutions with a correspondingly long institutional culture could within a few days reverse their editorial policy 180 degrees and continue publishing as though that was always the case. Can we explain such a change simply by referring to the appointment of Ahmet Hakan to the top of Hürriyet, someone with a reputation for tooting his own horn? I think this is also our mistake. We did not realize that with the occasional reform to the Press Law was the equivalent of throwing us a bone. For example, we thought being a union member in Turkey was a badge of courage while in Britain one cannot begin to practice journalism without being a union member. Even worse, it sometimes seems like the main purpose of our union is to cling on to its premises in Cağaloğlu.

Times are such that Süleyman Demirel is considered a democrat for tolerating dissent with the words “You don’t wear out the road by marching,” i.e. there is no need to get upset by a bit of protest. I very clearly remember the pressure on media during the Nationalist Front governments of Demirel, that very same democrat. It was not his invention. There was pressure on media during the single party period up until 1950, then during the Democrat Party period of the 1950s, then the Demirel years, the Özal Period, and now under AK Party. With the exception of a few short years of social democratic government in between, I don’t remember a period when we could work without being threatened. With the bar set so low, the victory of social democrats in the recent local elections on 31 March has suddenly let in a fresh breeze into the country. If this fresh breeze can continue, I think and hope that the government monopoly on media will begin to fracture, and our young colleagues will find new space to maneuver. At this point, we find ourselves going back to the beginning. What will a newly established media system look like?

According to data provided by the Journalists Union of Turkey, there are currently 13 journalists in prison in Turkey, leaving aside pure freedom of expression cases for which no one can assign an exact number. There were 57 journalists in prison in Turkey according to the 2023 report of the Dicle Fırat Journalists Association published at the beginning of the year. Furthermore, in 2023 new investigations were launched against 75 journalists and 66 new court cases were launched. Some 280 journalists were indicted. The journalists on trial appeared before a court at least 821 times and 44 journalists were sentenced. Journalists were sentenced to a total of 48 years, nine months and 14 days of imprisonment and fined a total of 147,486 TL. As you can see, even among colleagues, there is a significant difference between the east and west of Turkey. Which criteria will we apply to decide who is a journalist? This is one of the fundamental areas of conflict which we need to overcome.

Furthermore, who can resist the call of social media, which delivers information to millions in a matter of seconds? We now face many questions such as how to fact-check information, how to convey opposing views and how to revitalize readers’ and viewers’ demand for true news. And of course, there is the question of how freedom of expression and employee rights for journalists can be indelibly and inviolably established this time to be able to do all that I’ve just mentioned.

I know that the media climate in a country cannot be very different from its political climate. Nevertheless, those of us accept being called journalists must not give up standing up for our profession. Otherwise, as has become the fate of mainstream broadcast media opposition -such as Halk TV, Sözcü, KRT, and Tele1– locked in a cycle of passing off commentary for reporting, of turning every other sentence into a slogan, and seeing themselves in the shoes of policymakers, we will find ourselves still believing we are practicing journalism.