Ed Webb's List: Turkey Media

• As soon as the counting kicked off at the ballot boxes, Turkey’s Twitter timeline was swarming with reports of fraud, power outages, and paper ballots found in trash bins. Calls for people to go to local polling stations to watch the counting were circulating. And the mainstream media, with reports coming in from two news agencies, were reporting totally conflicting results. Journos asked its followers to tweet the results from ballot boxes. Citizens who were already at polling stations started taking pictures of the ballot box results and sent them to Journos, using the hashtag #SandıkTutanağı. Engin says they have never experienced such voluminous response from citizens on one day (bear in mind that they were actively reporting during the Gezi Protests). Thousands of reports reached Journos via Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, and SMS messaging only in a couple of hours.
• As Journos kept on receiving and documenting those results through the early hours of 31 March, people in front of their television and computer screens witnessed this: in Ankara, where the votes had been swaying between the AKP candidate Melih Gökçek and the CHP’s Mansur Yavaş, vote-count pages stopped refreshing. At the time, a sizeable portion of votes were left to be counted in two neighborhoods that are CHP strongholds, and Gökçek was leading by only three thousand votes. For almost an hour, there was no incoming data. In the meantime, citizens reported that the Interior Minister, Efkan Ala, arrived at a polling station with riot police, while Melih Gökçek went to the building that houses the Supreme Electoral Board (YSK). When the data page was finally refreshed, people saw that all the results were uploaded at once, and Gökçek was leading by twenty thousand votes. Whether or not that pause meant fraud, people’s concerns with the process skyrocketed, and reports of ballot box results soared on Twitter.
• the launch of Turkey’s first citizen vote counting system
• On the morning of 1 April, when official complaints about elections were due, they documented nearly two hundred and fifty irregularities. “This is the first time citizens counted their own votes in Turkey,” says Engin. “We made a call on social media, and in a couple of hours we have received more than six thousand responses. With software finalized in two hours and a team of two hundred volunteers, we reported the irregularities and challenged results in Istanbul and Ankara,”
• “We are quite worried about the current political and media system in Turkey,” Engin adds, “and we want our broadcast to provoke people to interrogate what the system tells them.” I press him a little and remind him that their efforts could not change much, so why continue? At first, he does not even understand my question. He then explains that we need people to stop submitting to the state, capital, and the mainstream media. Until then, Journos will keep on doing what they are doing.
• Journos is now working on a web interface that will share all the ballot box results they have received with the public in a way that lets people run their own search. Citizens will be able to detect the discrepancies between the number of votes documented in paper ballots and the official results

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• The information isn’t censorable, and the ruling party in Turkey knows this.
• In the case of Turkey, we are not dealing with Mubarak, whose inner circle was widely reported as technologically illiterate, and was also facing a do-or-die moment. Remember, they didn’t just shut Twitter, or just Internet. Egypt shut down cell networks as well, attempting to block almost all peer-to-peer communications in Egypt. These are the actions of a regime facing an existential crisis. It didn’t work. Mubarak’s shutdown backfired partially because there was already a known address for the protests — Tahrir Square. Al Jazeera kept information flowing anyway. Many people I talked to in Egypt told me families worried about their children in Tahrir had no way of communicating with them. So they headed to … Tahrir Square.
• To the degree that it may be a Streisand moment, it is an external one. The whole world seems to have now woken up to the depth of the political crisis in Turkey, which is not news to anyone in the country.
• First, here are the crucial facts. There are four legal cases that form the (murky legal) basis for the ban: two are defamation cases (a poet who was impersonated, and a minor politician accused of corruption), one murky case that is reportedly lost because the court has been recently dissolved, and one about a housewife in whose name someone opened social media accounts, impersonating her and distributing pornography allegedly of her but actually not. The legal basis is of the block is murky, since the court orders are only for blocking specific accounts, not all of Twitter.

• During the rally, Erdogan also talked about the threat social media, including Facebook and YouTube, poses to family values. He talked about its disruption of privacy, and how these foreign companies do not obey Turkish court orders but obey US and European courts.

  In other words, Erdogan’s strategy is to demonize social media.
• It is a strategy of placing social media outside the sacred sphere, as a disruption of family, as a threat to unity, as an outside blade tearing at the fabric of society.
• Erdogan likely still has enough supporters to win elections, but to continue to win, he needs to keep them off social media. His game is to scare them about all that comes from social media. He knows they’ll hear of the corruption tapes. But they are now associated with the same source that maligns housewives as porn-stars.
• Erdogan used the same strategy in Gezi: government-controlled mass media portrayed it as a movement which attacked and beat up women wearing the hijab even when they had their babies in their arms, and one in which protesters went into Mosques to have alcohol-fueled orgies—stories which turned out to be false, but which the prime minister has repeated in almost every rally since (I suspect the housewife with malicious porn impersonators will be the new constant story).
• This is what Erdogan is now doing to social media: portray it as a place from which only ugly things come from, and which poses a danger to family and to unity. Given that Turkey has a civil war that has erupted on its border with Syria, and is housing millions of distraught refugees, it is not hard to understand why people fear anything that they see as fomenting “disunity.”
• The fact that much good comes out of digital technologies, like busting of censorship, does not negate other concerns. Anxiety-inducing techniques, which Erdogan is engaging at full-throttle, may turn out to work very well
• These blocks are meant to demonize social media content, and dissuade Erdogan supporters from seeking them, knowing what to seek, and being motivated to seek. If they know what to look for, and if they are motivated to want to look for it, circumvention remains possible.

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• The state of the Turkish media is rather troublesome. Today, pro-government outlets dominate both electronic and written media. The recent seizure of the Akşam daily by the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund and its quick sale to the Ciner Group further consolidated pro-government supremacy over public discourse. The appointments to the Akşam daily have left little doubt as to what sort of line the paper will take. It is no wonder that Reporters Without Borders recently ranked Turkey 154th out of 179 countries in terms of press freedom. According to a report published by the main opposition party, there are 64 journalists under arrest in the country and another 123 facing trial on charges of terrorism. This is, of course, not healthy and is extremely worrying for a country that has been seen as an inspiration for many others in the Arab and Islamic world.
• there are extremely vocal oppositional views expressed in papers such as Sözcü and Taraf, but these are far from able to reach mainstream Turks. Also, there are some successful online media outlets, such as T24, that have welcomed Hasan Cemal and many other alternative pens. However, these are unable to penetrate the Anatolian heartland
• such contradiction with what the AK Party stood for in 2002
• there is distance to be made before Turkey's political class will treat freedom of expression as a default setting of a normal democracy

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• Across the globe, and especially in young or struggling democracies like Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, Hungary and Albania, the lack of media independence is doing real damage. Media executives who intimidate or censor reporters while kowtowing to governments to protect their other business interests are undermining the freedom and independence of the press that is vital to establishing and consolidating a democratic political culture.
• Dirty alliances between governments and media companies and their handshakes behind closed doors damage journalists’ role as public watchdogs and prevent them from scrutinizing cronyism and abuses of power. And those who benefit from a continuation of corrupt practices also systematically seek to prevent serious investigative journalism.
• It’s not possible to conduct serious journalism in such a polluted system. These conflicts of interest have transformed Turkey’s major newsrooms into prisons: coverage of economic corruption in Turkey today is almost zero. There are a few tiny, brave independent outlets, which break stories that are critical of the government, but these stories are hardly ever picked up by the mainstream media and therefore have little impact.
• Turkey’s rapidly growing economy has caused such greed that the media owners regularly counteract the judgment of professional journalists who are trying to do their jobs on behalf of the public. Editorial content is strictly controlled by media bosses who have other business interests and are submissive to the government. With, or more often without, any direct government intervention, they impose self-censorship on a daily basis and silence colleagues who defend basic journalistic ethics. With hardly any union presence in these outlets, there is very little job security.

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• both the Turkish democracy and freedom of media are in a much better place than where they were in 1980s, 1990s and even early 2000s.
• Just 5 years ago, we could still not mention '1915' in our writings and conversations without a fear of state and widespread public reaction. Now, one can see the word 'genocide' used in articles and book titles.
• Today, even though it is clear that the Turkish government and state wish to influence and coerce press reports and some media outlets willingly or often unwillingly oblige, Turkish media is still full of extremely critical reports on the government.
• Yet, stating the facts that Turkey has come a long way in the last decade, and that it actually is by and large free, does not mean that where the media is today is acceptable. Turkish media is suffering from a mixture of old and new problems that urgently need to be addressed.
• the strong state tradition in Turkey showed itself again with the creation of the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK) in 1994, which sought to ensure that the newly freed media was kept under control through regulations, fines and pressure
• In 2011, AKP government repealed the restrictive RTUK law and adopted a new broadcasting law in line with the EU accession criteria. However, from 2011 and onwards, Turkey also saw AKP government lapsing back to strong state policies.
• media outlets have found themselves increasingly under pressure to abide within sensitivities of the government. RTUK, has a different political and social outlook and list of ‘red lines’ now compared to restrictive 'secular days', but it is still the good old state stick to keep rowdy media in line
• In issues of national security and potentially risky incidents, the state handling of the fallout continues to be restrictive. The courts have recently issued injunctions to stop broadcasters and media from reporting developments. The most recent two examples related to an incident in which Turkish jets bombed a group of young Kurdish smugglers near Uludere on Turkey-Iraq border and the car bomb attack in Reyhanli, that killed more than 50 people.
• Turkish media is still loosely divided between fiercely anti or fiercely pro government views and is unhealthily polarised like the rest of Turkish society. This, and impossibility of any government fully controlling media in the age of internet, limit the historic tendencies of strong state policies to filter information, which AKP seems happy to utilise
• we see major problems in terror laws that criminalize expression of non-violent opinions and the wholesale and prolonged detention of suspects throughout the legal procedures
• Turkey desperately needs a thorough judicial reform and a complete revision of terror laws
• While television channels can be a good revenue generating investment, print media is not. The main return of newspapers is the power, influence and chances it grants owners in their other business and personal interests
• The immense economic interests of media bosses put their staff into a precarious position and fear of losing their jobs
• Turkish press products are dominated by unhealthy numbers of columns but not investigative journalism. Payments received by these columnists in leading papers can reach shocking levels, while reporters are paid very low wages
• As Turkey is changing and it is becoming difficult for the state to simply control media and flow of information, and as the Turkish public is becoming more aware and demanding of their rights, the Turkish media is still suffering from a wide range of external and internal failures.
• The never before seen widespread condemnation of mainstream media outlets by the Turkish public points not so much to a deteriorating democracy in Turkey, but when put in its context quite the opposite: Turkey is advancing and she does not want to lapse back to where things once were.

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• After days of on-location observing, I have come to the conclusion that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s biggest loss is the erosion of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s intellectual support base. This loss curtails Erdogan’s ability to control Turkish public opinion significantly because the average Turk has lost his trust of the mainstream media, and the internal rifts within pro-AKP media establishment are taking their toll.
• Either run by friends of the AKP or manipulated through different means ranging from incentives to outright crude pressure, media outlets that are functioning today are only semi-independent when it comes to political news.
• when dissenting opinions are continuously punished in courts as well as through other means (social media attacks, threats, loss of prestige or maybe employment), voicing any sort of criticism becomes an act of bravery The system has perfected itself so much so that corruption monitoring and transparency in government spending remain unspeakable.
• None of the tactics adopted in the post-Gezi repression is new. The witch hunt of activists and journalists, assigning blame to ambiguous “foreign” enemies, unknown internal illegal organizations, Orwellian investigations, increasing paranoia and fear for personal and national security — these and other methods have been applied for decades. However, the intensity of the repression is now expected to increase because the AKP’s confidence in its intellectual base has decreased.

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