The US trial of Turkish banker Mehmet Hakan Atilla, featuring the notorious Iranian-Turkish gold trader Reza Zarrab as a witness, has Turks glued to Twitter. Zarrab testified Nov. 29 that he bribed Turkey's former Economic Minister Mehmet Zafer Caglayan in 2012 by paying him more than $50 million to help Iran evade US economic sanctions.

The amount of alleged bribes would most likely be sufficient to generate serious political turmoil in any given democracy. The allegations of corruption reach all the way up the political ladder. On Nov. 26, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced he will resign if the main opposition party can prove its accusations that the Erdogan family is hiding millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. Where does all this money come from? What is the wealth of the Erdogan family and senior politicians? These questions are difficult for the Turkish media to pose under the government's watchful eye. So rather than ask, some prominent journalists are arguing that the public doesn't care all that much about corruption — despite the Zarrab case going viral on social media.

Turkish media is frequently in the news regarding censorship, imprisonment of journalists and the burgeoning pro-government media apparatus dominating any news in the Turkish language. But there's another aspect that might help us understand, to an extent, why and how these journalists think the Turkish public is numb to outrageous corruption allegations.

On Nov. 20, Faruk Bildirici, the ombudsman for the Hurriyet daily, carried out an informal investigation after a reader’s letter red-flagged the Instagram account of one of the paper’s own writers. Onur Basturk, a lifestyle columnist with a strong following on social media, had shared photos of himself in 11 different locations over 4½ months. The title of Bildirici’s piece was “Vacation With a Loaner Car,” about a car company giving Basturk a vehicle to "test drive."