Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan [/caption]
hedef göstermek [heh-DEF geuh-stair-MEK] v. to denounce, to point the finger at; v. a means of informing the public favoured by the mainstream Turkish media, especially at times of political tension.
In April 1998, a leading newspaper published extracts from the confession of a captured Kurdish militant leader naming half a dozen men (journalists and a human rights activist) that were alleged to be in the pay of the armed Kurdish separatist PKK. The newspaper's chief columnist wrote a column entitled, "Let's know who the bastards are”. The journalists lost their jobs. One human rights activist narrowly escaped death when a nationalist shot him seven times. Later the incriminating parts of the confession turned out to have been added by the military to undermine critics of its running of the Kurdish war. In 2009, Turkey's top general admitted the whole affair was “a mistake”.
In 2007, a teenager shot an Armenian-Turkish editor dead in central Istanbul. The man convicted of planning the murder told a court that he did not know the editor but had read that he was “anti-Turkish” in the newspapers. This is not uncommon. For instance, in 2004, when an editor published an article claiming that one of Ataturk's adopted daughters was an Armenian orphan, he was subject to a ferocious campaign of media vilification. One columnist wrote, “Even orang-utans find this man who vomits his hatred of the Turks disgusting.” Another issued what sounded like a veiled threat: “Has Hrant Dink, who clearly knows Turkish well, heard of the Turkish expression, ‘to show a bludgeon under the table cloth’?”
The past fortnight has seen welter of cases, all linked to escalating PKK violence. First, an Islamist newspaper accused the editor of a well-known liberal newspaper (one of the men who lost his job in 1998) of being a PKK propagandist. Then, following hints from the Prime Minister that he had (unconstitutionally) ordered courts to take steps to ban a Kurdish nationalist party, a newspaper owned by a company whose general manager is the Prime Minister's son-in-law published photos of a Kurdish deputy carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag. “It has been indicated [the use of the passive is a common stylistic trait of this style of journalism] that the bag is only sold in shops in France and Germany and not in Turkey. The value of the bag is between 2,500 and 3,000 lira.” Like most branded objects in Turkey, the bag turned out to be a fake. The deputy had bought it from a street vendor for 60 lira. Then, on 10 September, a tabloid published photos of another deputy from the Kurdish party on holiday with his long-term partner, with the headline “Hugs with the terrorists, hugs on the beach!” Speaking on public TV, the deputy Prime Minister described the story as a “great journalistic success”, but that was perhaps a bit generous. The photos turned out to be several months old, and the journalist was silly enough to name the hotel the deputy had stayed at. It didn't take more experienced colleagues long to confirm that the price of rooms was barely 25 percent of the price quoted.
So it would seem that the standards of this most hallowed form of Turkish journalism are slipping. Could it have anything to do with the radical transformation of the media since the current government rose to absolute power since 2009, sparking a major clear-out of experienced reporters? Perhaps. The youngsters drafted in to replace them need not worry: look back just a few years and they will find a legacy of journalistic practice rich enough to inspire the most cynical of them.
