(Andrew Finkel was until recently a Reagan–Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. He has also served as a correspondent based in Istanbul for a variety of international organisations including The Times, TIME, the Economist, and CNN. He is also one of the few foreigners to have written a regular column in the Turkish language media.)
By Andrew Finkel
IBI Global Journalist
IBI Global Journalist
Blaming the media when things go wrong may be an old political trick, but it is one that succeeded only too well in earning Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoðan an enthusiastic round of applause in a speech at the end of a Washington gala dinner last June. His subject was the vexed question of US-Turkish relations and he won the approval of his audience for his assertion that a friendship conducted through the media was bound to go wrong.
The Turkish government’s view that the unravelling of one of the key strategic friendships of the post-War era is a matter of press perception than of substance has not convinced everyone. Turkey and America do not see eye to eye on what is happening in Iraq. However Mr Erdoðan’s less than full respect for the integrity of his country’s media, an attitude repeated on other occasions, has suddenly found a much wider audience.
The weight of anti-US headlines and editorials, stories about the blood lust of American troops in Iraq, even the suggestion that American scientists had caused or refused to issue warnings about the Asian tsunami, led Robert Pollock, editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, to speculate in a signed article that Turkey was not so much Europe’s “sick man” as that continent’s raving loony. He described the press as egging Turkish society on a downward spiral to becoming “small minded, paranoid, and marginal … friendless in America and [pace Ankara's EU aspirations] unwelcome in Europe”.
Others began to ask themselves what exactly it is the Turkish public reads. The Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post were among the many to report the runaway sales of a lurid revenge thriller called Metal Storm in which a Turkish patriot avenges the American invasion of his country by detonating a nuclear device outside the White House. The Financial Times pondered the success of “Mein Kampf” in Ankara bookstores (March 10, 2005).
Throughout the 1990s, the Turkish press was often depicted as competitive and vibrant, despite the attempts by an oppressive state apparatus to prune it back. The implication in the annual reports of organisations concerned with press freedoms like the publishers of Global Journalist, the International Press Institute (IPI) was that if the press did not speak out more openly, it is because it is confronted by an antediluvian statute book and the deep-seated illiberality of the Turkish establishment. These organisations have been slow to take on the proposition that there may be something rotten inside the media itself and the consequences could be equally damaging to Turkish society – if only because it has allowed not simply the Wall Street journal but the government itself to dismiss the country’s media not as a watchdog but as an untamed beast not to be taken seriously. Indeed, I would argue further that a strategy only to criticise the state and not consider the corporate cultures of media organisations themselves has led to an erosion of press freedom and legitimated bad practice.
Of course the Turkish media itself has answered some of the accusations that it behaves irresponsibly. One not altogether satisfactory riposte is that genuine Turkish anxiety over the quagmire on the other side of its border with Iraq has indeed made press and society more receptive to the journalistic equivalent of asymmetric warfare – a barrage of rumour and innuendo against which the only defence is integrity and vigilance, habits which not all news outlets in Turkey have bothered to cultivate. Yet another reply is that the worst excesses of vitriol and slander are in fringe publications of limited circulation, and that it is wrong to depict them as having penetrated the mainstream. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) whose website monitors among other things anti-semitism often quotes papers like Yenicað or Orta Dogu, publications which most Turks have never even seen, let alone read. Even those papers with slightly higher circulation which attempt to curry government favour, like Yeni Þafak, have only limited influence over policy makers. One of the columnists whom MEMRI quotes for his crypto-Nazi stance in the religious reactionary Vakýt newspaper is Hüseyin Üzmez, an unreconstructed ultra-nationalist infamous for the attempted assassination of the liberal newspaper editor Ahmet Emin Yalman back in 1952!
This leads to a third line of defence that the real novelty is not the scattering of wild, politically unreconstructed views throughout the Turkish media, but the West’s decision to pay attention to them. Turks themselves, like readers of the US supermarket scandal sheets have long acquired of reading their newspapers with a pinch of salt. Much of the current criticism of the Turkish press originates in the very American neo-conservative tradition which is fundamentally peeved by Turkey’s refusal to see events in Iraq through its end of the binoculars. This school is certainly more sensitive to government deputies’ and ministers’ failure to distance themselves from attitudes which are anti-semitic or otherwise distasteful.
The outgoing American ambassador to Turkey famously organised a public seminar to refute charges that his government was responsible for the tsunami. And yet the British media continuously mocks the Bush administration’s own medieval scientists who deny the existence of global warming or see life inviable in a stem cell embryo. Curiously enough the Turkish state, too, took a dim view of the fringe sectarian paper Yeni Asya when in 1999 it described the horrendous earthquake in Western Turkey as divine retribution against the country’s secular establishment. The subsequent trial of the editor and a journalist of that paper was a cause celebre among international organisations concerned with freedom of expression and the subject of a stiff letter of protest from the director of the IPI to the then Turkish prime minister (19 June, 2001).
That applause for the Tayyip Erdoðan’s Washington speech still suggests, however, that most Turks suspect that the problem is not superficial and lies within the way the press itself is a political actor, and the way it uses the power it accumulates irresponsibly or in a way motivated by self-interest, with or without the complicity of the state.
This point was reiterated at a recent lunch with foreign correspondents where the head of the country’s premier industrial corporation, Mustafa Koç, complained of the “harm” the nation’s press had done in helping to precipitate the economic crisis of 2001. Many media groups used their influence to secure bank licences and engage in a financial world in which they were ill-equipped to operate. In several instances banks owned by groups with media interests operated fraudulently. The forced closure of some 20 public and private banks cost the Turkish tax payer $46 billion of private banking debt (then over 33 percent of GNP) through the government’s insurance deposit scheme.
One of the most notorious examples was the $6 billion collapse of Imar Bank controlled by the Uzan family, a group whose interests included Turkey’s first private television station, Star, as well as a newspaper of the same name. It used these outlets to pursue an unabashed war against the group’s business opponents and set a tone for yellow journalism throughout the media during the 1990s. One of Star’s most famous vendettas was against the head of the Turkish Capital Market Board who had accused the Uzan parent company of illegally stripping the assets of CEAÞ, a major hydro-electric supplier which the Uzan’s had purchased from the state. Those holding shares in the publicly listed CEAÞ, including Mark Mobius’ Templeton Securities, found the value of their shares eroded and the incident eroded foreign confidence in the emerging Istanbul Stock Exchange.
The Uzan media latterly promoted the political fortunes of Cem Uzan, one of the family members. Cem Uzan’s “Youth Party” ran on an ultra-nationalist, anti-Europe, and anti-America ticket- a stance more than justified by the conviction of his family in a New York court for fraud with a judgement to repay $2.6 to the Motorola Corporation and a further $1.7 billion to the mobile phone manufacturer Nokia. When Imar Bank collapsed the Star media group was seized by the government bank regulators to repay debts some of which were also fraudulently incurred, including the resale of government securities which the bank had neglected to purchase in the first place.
Yet while outside monitoring agencies rightly criticised the restriction which the Turkish government were using to confine the press they were found no voice to criticise the e corporate culture of Turkish news organisations themselves. Admittedly this is no easy task as two further examples illustrate.
The first concerns the dismissal of a columnist of the pro-government Yeni Þafak, a paper which is often cited as the most noxious in its wild accounts of US atrocities in Iraq. Husnu Mahalli, a Syrian national, was not a reporter but a columnist for the paper who expressed views common in the Arab world that the “irrationality” of terrorist violence has to be seen in the context of the abuse suffered by the civilian populations in Palestine, Fallujah and elsewhere. He was virulently opposed to Israel and infamous for having appeared to defend (September 5, 2004) the deadly Chechen raid on a school in Beslan by citing years of Russian oppression. He is quoted by the MEMRI website with an article its editors describe as detailing “America’s purported murderous activities [in Iraq] as emanating from a genetically ingrained tendency to murder. “Members of the prime minister’s press team deny they put pressure on Yeni Þafak to drop Dr Mahalli from its staff, the Turkish press community has little doubt that he was sacrificed to save the government from embarrassment. If this assumption is true then it would be a counter-intuitive example of an Islamic-leaning paper coming under pressure from a government it supports to adopt a more pro-American line.
The second example is more complex. On June 23, 2004 Milliyet, an aggressively secular and left of centre paper, published the first of a three part series by its Ankara bureau chief. In bold headlines above the fold it announced that it had exclusive access to the minutes of a secret meeting in Washington to discuss probable Turkish reaction to the hypothetical Iraqi Kurdish seizure of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Such a story goes to the heart of Turkish concerns that the only tangible result to from the American invasion on the other side of its border with Iraq will be an independent Iraqi Kurdish state. This, Turks fear, will aggravate discontent among their own Kurdish population and point to a steady increasing level in terrorist violence by Kurdish separatists inside Turkey itself. Thus the story could be predicted to stimulate anti-American sentiment.
The problem is that many of the people reported to be at the State Department meeting and whose views were quoted in detail were not even in America at the time. Professor Henri Barkey, a professor at Lehigh University, who was in London, expressed outrage not just that he was reported to have attended a non-existent meeting, but that even the photo purporting to be of him on Milliyet’s front page was of someone entirely different. According to a press release issued by the US embassy (June 25, 2004) in Ankara “The alleged quotes by these experts that have appeared in the Turkish press are fabrications… Reports in the Turkish press alleging that such a meeting took place are false.”
Fortunately Milliyet had an ombudsman, the first in Turkey, a distinguished journalist who was elected president of the international Organisation of News Ombudsmen. It therefore had someone responsible to adjudicate the controversy. The ombudsman, Yavuz Baydar, came to the conclusion that his newspaper’s Ankara bureau chief had been hoodwinked by a Turkish academic based at Utah University, who had claimed to be at the meeting and who was acting from motives which were unclear. Baydar saw no option but to print a retraction.
This he did, against the wishes of the proprietor of his newspaper and at great personal cost. Mr Baydar was dismissed from his job as ombudsman and also removed from his position as the host of a nightly current affairs programme broadcast by CNN-Turk – a 24 hours news television station which exists as a joint venture between DYH and AOL Time Warner. Although not fired entirely, Baydar took these actions as a form of constructive dismissal and eventually found a job as ombudsman on another newspaper after waiting to receive his severance pay. He set out these events in a letter of complaint he sent to the publication committee of the Dogan Yayin Holding (DYH) which oversees a code of ethics for the group’s many publications. He also requested that the IPI issue a protest on his behalf as did other IPI members in Turkey. The new president of the ONO, Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for National Public Radio in America, similarly contacted the IPI as well as Milliyet.
Milliyet defended both its decision to remove Baydar and to print the story of the alleged State Department meeting. A letter from the paper’s then editor-in-chief Mehmet Yilmaz to a Turkish columnist and IPI member Fehmi Koru of Yeni Þafak newspaper, the lone journalist to cover dismissal, said that Baydar’s complaints were motivated by bad faith after he had decided to join a rival newspaper. The board of the International Press Institute was by chance meeting in Istanbul in November 2004 at the invitation of executive board member Vuslat Dogan Sabanci, daughter of the DYH chairman Aydin Dogan, and chief executive of a Milliyet’s sister newspaper Hurriyet. Following this meeting, Yilmaz reported to Mr Koru that “The IPI saw no need to accede to Mr Baydar’s request to put the matter on board’s agenda.”
Indeed in a letter to Baydar dated 10 January, 2005, the Austria-based IPI director Johann Fritz said that the IPI did consider the issue but came to no conclusion. “The Vienna staff cannot be expected to play the investigative detective,” he wrote. He disregarded Baydar’s central complaint that the IPI had an obligation to uncover the reasons why a newspaper would punish its own ombudsman for behaving honourably. Instead Mr Fritz described the issue as a labour dispute in which the IPI had no authority to become involved. Previously he had pleaded “pressures of time” for his refusal to meet with Mr Baydar during his visit for the board meeting in Turkey.
On the other hand, Mr Fritz on behalf of the IPI did find time to become involved in another labour dispute. He dispatched a stern letter to the Turkish prime minister (8 February, 2005) in which he protested the failure of the state regulator-appointed board of Star media group to re-instate nearly 700 workers from the Uzan era. That letter also described the closure of Imar Bank and the government take over of the CEAÞ electricity plant (presumably because of the Uzan’s group’s extensive media interests) actions (which) demonstrate a clear and open policy of repression and censorship against the free press in Turkey.”
Thus we have an example of the IPI failing to support a journalist in his lonely mission to write the truth, yet happy to criticise a government for failing to accept a situation whereby a business dynasty defrauds Turkish taxpayers and foreign shareholders on a massive scale and which moreover uses the money so extorted to finance a media group which supports the extremist and isolationist political ambitions of its proprietor.
So yes, the Turkish press is in need of radical reform and yes, the Turkish government frequently deserves criticism. The problem is finding someone to cast the first stone.
Time in Tunis