ANKARA, Turkey — In late March, Turkey’s 20-year-old liberal daily Radikal announced it was closing down, two years after it terminated its print edition to become a web-only publication. Though financial strains were said to have forced the closure, the real reason was an open secret — the daily’s editorial line and writers had long irked President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In his valedictory column, Radikal veteran Cengiz Candar — also an Al-Monitor columnist — said he was ending his four-decade career because doing journalism in Turkey was no longer possible.
The government-media struggle has been omnipresent in Turkey. Previous governments, too, have sought to control the media, but none could even hold a candle to the means of repression and intimidation the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has employed.
When the AKP came to power in November 2002, a major opportunity was already there for it to redesign the media to its will. A number of banks had collapsed in the 2001 financial crisis, ending up in state receivership at the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF), along with other assets their parent corporations owned, including newspapers and television channels. The TMSF, in other words the state, had become Turkey’s biggest media boss, controlling the Sabah, Takvim and Star newspapers and the Star, Kral TV, ATV and Cine-5 channels. In later years, the TMSF also seized the Aksam and Gunes dailies, the Show TV and SkyTurk channels, leading pay-television operator Digiturk and a number of radio stations and magazines, as their owner, Cukurova Holding, ran into trouble.
Businessmen and contractors close to Erdogan won almost all auctions the TMSF held to sell off those media outlets, taking the lead in building a new pro-government media, propped up with loans of up to $1 billion from public banks. So while the TMSF was selling off media outlets to collect the collapsed banks’ debt to the Treasury, public banks subordinate to the same Treasury were issuing loans to crony businessmen to finance those acquisitions. Some buyers such as Ethem Sancak, famous for saying he was “in love with Erdogan,” even got bonuses. Sancak, who bought the Star newspaper and then the Aksam and Gunes dailies and the SkyTurk channel, also acquired Cukurova’s BMC company, which manufactures armored vehicles for the Turkish army and police — without there even being a public auction, and with the TMSF taking over the company’s existing debts.
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