Bilge Yeşil’s book is a comprehensive analysis of Turkey’s media system and its reconfiguration under changing dynamics among the state, the military, and media conglomerates. The author examines the political and economic tensions that have shaped the media system in Turkey by covering current authoritarian and neoliberal discussions stretching from the 1980s to the contemporary rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). According to Yeşil, the current difficulties with Turkey’s media system are not unusual developments that can be simply imputed to the AKP rule, but rather are related to a series of vicissitudes occurring since the 1980s, especially in connection with media ownership structures, policy-making, patron-client relations, and the approach of a statist, nationalist ethos (p. 3). The book provides essential fundamental information on Turkey’s media history for readers unfamiliar with its politics, economy, history, and economic culture, while also presenting detailed information through case studies and interviews with journalists. Yeşil situates her interdisciplinary discussion on Turkish media alongside the trajectories it shares with other media systems worldwide, in particular offering comparisons with other Middle Eastern media systems, such as those in Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan.
Yeşil’s book is made up of six chapters. Chapter 1 examines how nationalism, statism, and secularism have permeated the Turkish public sphere and its media culture. The Kemalist regime that aimed to create a Westernized, secular nation-state imposed a top-down secularization model in order to transform the religious and mystical traditions of the rural and uneducated masses. From the early years of the Republic of Turkey onward, the press and radio were employed as tools to aid in the construction of a modern, Western, secular identity, representing the “voice of the nation.” Alternative voices, on the other hand, were considered threats to state unity, and thus were silenced by both the state and the military (p. 23). Yeşil provides a detailed introduction to the early media system in Turkey by offering a sophisticated political and social analysis of the transformation that occurred between the 1920s and the 1980s. Her analysis provides the reader with a solid understanding of current media issues in Turkey by offering a reliable historical background.
Chapter 2 explores the post-1980 transformation of Turkey’s media system under the convergence of the 1980 military coup, the neoliberal restructuring of economy, and increasing investment in telecommunications by non-media entrepreneurs (p. 31). This chapter is especially important for understanding how media ownerships were structured after the military coup in such a manner as to pave the way for non-media entrepreneurs to enter the field, how print venues became integrated into conglomerates, and how clientelism became established as the dominant mode of operation. While this transformation of the press system was a result of the commercialization of broadcasting worldwide, in Turkey it did not result in liberalization of the press because conglomerates depended on government licenses, subsidies, and privatization deals in order to conduct business in non-media sectors, thus leading to a loss of editorial independence, a decline in journalistic professionalism, and an increase in partisanship (p. 35). Turkey’s media became centralized under corporate giants, which became ever stronger and came to dominate and marginalize smaller players. And while, for instance, owners grew stronger, journalists became ever more vulnerable in terms of employment security and freedom of expression (p.44).
Chapter 3 discusses the nationalist discourse in mainstream media and the suppression of Kurdish and Islamic political actors that arose in the 1990s. In this chapter, Yeşil explains the effects of state oppression on Kurdish journalists and illustrates the discriminatory representation of Islamists in the mainstream media. That the state actively suppressed the Kurdish press was made clear through police investigations of Kurdish newspapers, newspaper distribution companies, and even news kiosks or coffeeshops that sold such newspapers (p. 57). Yeşil’s interviews with journalists who covered the events in southeast Turkey in the 1990s present insightful information regarding coverage of the Kurdish conflict in the past, a taboo issue that the author discusses judiciously. Kurdish journalists were murdered and jailed in order to prevent alternative coverage of the Kurdish conflict. Furthermore, like Kurdish journalists, the “reactionary forces” of Islam were also perceived as a threat to the republic. Beginning in the 1980s, Muslim entrepreneurs’ growing economic power helped fellow activists to expand their social, cultural, and economic organizations, as well as providing Islamist politicians with remarkable traction in the following decades (p. 61). By drawing attention to some of the extreme rituals of Islamists and certain corrupt religious leaders, the mainstream media aimed to impede their progress, and this ultimately culminated in a postmodern coup.
Chapter 4 explores the shifts in global and local conjunctures that facilitated the AKP’s rise in the early 2000s, followed by an overview of the neoliberal and pro-EU policies followed by the regime during its first term in power. During this first term, from 2003 to 2005, new laws were introduced to reform state-society relations, some of which complied with EU harmonization requirements and resulted in a relative easing of the restrictions on Kurdish cultural rights and allowed broadcasting in languages other than Turkish (p. 81). During the period between 2002 and 2007, relations between the government and the press were not particularly troublesome. However, over time, the United States’ invasion of Iraq, the emergence of a revisionist discourse on the Armenian genocide, the easing of Kurdish cultural rights, and the entry of foreign media companies into the Turkish market triggered, among nationalist groups, fears and anxieties concerning the decline of the Turkish state (p. 72). By presenting in this chapter a detailed analysis of the judiciary investigations into minority (i.e., Kurdish and Armenian) journalists and the murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, the author depicts how nationalist anxieties regenerated and emerged in the media, with negative nationalist media coverage of minority journalists concretizing the discrimination and manipulating national susceptibilities.
Chapter 5 explores Turkey’s contemporary media system by examining specific economic, political, and legal developments and the repercussions they have had on media ownership structures as well as on the freedom of the press and communications (p. 88). In the period between 2008 and 2010, several journalists were charged with attempted coups and terrorist propaganda as part of various investigations, including those into the Ergenekon affair, odatv, and the Kurdistan Communities Union (Koma Civakên Kurdistan, KCK) (p. 96). These investigations took place on both military and civil fronts, against the military (Ergenekon), secular journalists (odatv), and Kurdish politicians and journalists (KCK). The evidence supporting the allegations came primarily from personal documents, computer hard drives, and illegally wiretapped phone conversations that violated privacy rights on a national scale. Yeşil claims that arrests of journalists, the reshuffling of ownership structures that took place as a result of these operations, and the AKP’s strategic use of economic carrots and sticks all played a part in reshaping the media arena in Turkey between 2005 and 2013 (p. 105). The strengthening of pro-government media channels further limited the freedom of opposition media and weakened the visibility of oppositional ideas on mainstream channels.
As a result of discontent regarding the AKP’s environmental, urban, and labor policies and their increasingly authoritarian rule, the Gezi protests began on May 28, 2013. While mainstream media remained silent about the protests, social media came to serve as the main source of information among urban, tech-savvy youth. The number of Turkish users of Twitter increased from 1.8 million on May 29 to more than 9.5 million on June 10. With the critical role Twitter came to play during the Gezi protests, the government introduced several restrictions on social media, claiming that it was being used to incite unrest (pp. 109–114). However, the prohibitions against Twitter, as well as YouTube, ultimately proved ineffective. Six months after the Gezi protests, the AKP received another setback as a result of a massive corruption investigation: Gülenist (an Islamic transnational religious movement led by the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen) police officers and media channels leaked wiretapped conversations of government officials, and Gülenist newspapers and television channels that had long supported the AKP became fierce critics overnight (p. 115). The final chapter of Yeşil’s study examines these two major legitimation crises faced by the AKP government, crises that found particularly fertile ground online. The AKP responded to the Gezi protests and corruption scandals with increasing restrictions and limitations that ultimately placed Turkey alongside global authoritarian regimes (p. 126).
The book concludes with a summary of the transformation of the media system from the early, promising days of AKP rule to the current authoritarian model. Yeşil has also added an epilogue so as to include events that occurred between the completion of the book and its publication. The November 1, 2015 elections—won by the AKP—and the arrests of two well-known journalists, Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, show that authoritarian tendencies only continued to increase after the manuscript’s completion.
Overall, Yeşil’s study might be criticized for its lack of a comprehensive critical literature review introducing existing debates on the Turkish media. While the author does provide an extensive historical background, she does not undertake a survey of the critical literature on Turkish media history and contemporary debates. This makes it difficult to locate Yeşil’s study within the scope of the literature, and so the addition of such a critical literature review would have made the book still more comprehensive. This point aside, Yeşil’s major contribution to the literature lies in her attempt to discover the extent of relations between the media, the state, the military, and conglomerates. She develops her argument by means of an in-depth analysis of Turkey’s media history supported by detailed interviews and a number of case studies. The book can serve as an essential guide not only for students of international communications and media, but also for scholars studying Turkey’s media history, culture, and politics.
