The International Press Institute (IPI) and its affiliate, the South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO), today condemned a campaign of repression targeting journalists covering ongoing protests in Turkey.
IPI Press Freedom Manager Barbara Trionfi said: “We are deeply disturbed by accounts of numerous journalists being beaten, detained arbitrarily and forced to delete footage. We are similarly disturbed by reports of outright hostility towards journalists coming from the highest levels of government. We urge Turkey’s government to respect the fundamental role that journalists play in a democracy and to ensure that media representatives are allowed to do their job.”
Turkish news website Bianet reported yesterday that police conducted early-morning raids on the offices of Ozgur Radio, the Etkin News Agency and the newspaper Atilim, detaining numerous individuals. The raids followed reports Monday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) cataloguing approximately 20 instances in recent weeks in which foreign and domestic journalists were beaten, hit by tear gas canisters or rubber bullets, or detained, particularly on Saturday night as police evicted demonstrators from Gezi Park near Taksim Square in central Istanbul.
The reported targeting of journalists has come amid a climate of intolerance for news coverage of protests emanating directly from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office. The prime minister on Sunday accused foreign media outlets such as CNN, the BBC and Reuters of “fabricating news” about the protests that have wracked Turkey for weeks, alleging that the outlets were “conspiring against Turkey”.
USA Today reported that Erdogan yesterday, in a meeting with legislators from his Justice and Development Party (AKP), praised the conduct of security forces and said he would seek to expand their powers to give them more leeway in dealing with protests. The daily also said that Turkey’s justice ministry was putting together legislation on “Internet crime” that would regulate and restrict the use of social media platforms such as Twitter.
“We are working on a series of regulations for Facebook and Twitter against those who provoke the public, manipulate people with fake news, or forwards [sic] individuals to social turmoils and incidents jeopardizing property and human security”, Turkish news website Bianet quoted Interior Minister Muammer Guler as saying earlier this week.
Echoing Erdogan’s comments about foreign media, the pro-government daily Takvim yesterday published a fabricated interview with senior CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour alleging that she said she was ordered to cover the ongoing protests in order to destabilise the country on behalf of international business interests.
Amanpour took to Twitter yesterday to condemn the defamatory article, posting: “Shame on you @Takvim for publishing FAKE interview with me.”
Takvim is part of the Turkuaz Media Group, which also includes the major daily Sabah. The group is owned by Calik Holding, whose CEO, Ahmet Calik, is Erdogan’s son-in-law.
The Turkish public initially was forced to rely on social media platforms and foreign news outlets to obtain news of the protests after they erupted in late May following the brutal police treatment of demonstrators seeking to prevent the demolition of Gezi Park. Many domestic media outlets gave little to no coverage to the story in its early days and some of those that did cover protests have been subject to official sanctions.
Last week, Turkey’s High Council of Radio and Television (RTUK) fined four television networks – Ulusal TV, Halk TV, Cem TV and EM TV – reasoning that their coverage of protests encouraged violence and was “harming the physical, moral and mental development of children and young people”.
Also last week, Hurriyet reported Sunday, a court in Ankara banned daily newspaper Taraf from publishing claims that Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) illegally spied on Turkish businessmen with alleged ties to opposition parties. Taraf claimed that the surveillance occurred in order to use information collected to prevent those individuals from bidding in public tenders.
The court in Ankara concluded that the reports were “targeting the institution”, Hurriyet said, and Taraf on Sunday protested the ruling by publishing a graphic depicting a number of penguins. The birds have become a symbol of the reported failure by media outlets to cover the protests in their early stages, reportedly in reference to CNN Turk’s broadcast of a wildlife documentary on penguins rather than coverage of the initial police action against demonstrators.
Journalist and media scholar Prof. Haluk Sahin, a member of the board of IPI’s Turkish National Committee, was critical of domestic media outlets’ early coverage in an interview published by online magazine Jadaliyya last week.
“Of course we should not generalize to the media as a whole, but the mainstream big media performed dismally which was another manifestation of its moral bankruptcy because the big media have not been doing their job for quite a while,” he said. “The media bosses and tycoons have decided that doing business with the government is more profitable than doing their job, which is informing the people about what is going on. So this Gezi Park uprising has show[n] very clearly that these media are not in the news business. And one of the good things that will come out of this event is the realization that a new media is badly needed in Turkey.”
The recent violence against journalists in Turkey represents a troubling new nadir in the state of press freedom in Turkey, which has continued to decline in recent years. Nearly 60 journalists remain imprisoned in Turkey – reportedly more than in any other country in the world. The vast majority of those journalists are being held on as-yet unproven allegations of links to terrorist groups, but supporters maintain that the journalists have been detained in retaliation for coverage that shed a critical light on government actions.
