Daily Periodical Review: Hurriyet. January 12-24, 2011

The thing about reading a newspaper every day is that if you read the same one, you have to wonder if what you are reading is in fact the news or just the news they want to report.

In Turkey I did not have much choice in selecting the paper I would read. It wasn't that there were not a bunch of different papers.  No, there were plenty of those.  It may not be an exaggeration to say that if I spoke Turkish I would have had dozens of choices. But then, I don't speak Turkish.  So on the newsstand every morning, among the many choices, I would look for that one English language daily - Hurriyet Daily News (HDN).

One of the things I noticed while sorting through the papers looking for the HDN was that they did not all have the same visual content. I do speak pictures and though I could not understand anything else on the front page, the sense I got from the pictures was that there was no consensus on what was ‘front page’ news.

The Suleiman Soap Opera

That's not a surprise. One of the reasons that there is such a diversity in the Turkish press is because many of the papers are mouthpieces for political parties. They have an official relationship, like Pravda or Fox News. And then, of course, they report with that slant.

So does the paper I read have a bias? I expect it does. To me it seemed to take the opposition (CHP) party’s view and reported on events that would resonate with people who shared those views. People with an anti-Islamist, secular, modernist perspective.

There were plenty of stories relating to issues of liberty. A minor controversy sprung up over a TV soap opera that fictionalizes the life of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. It portrayed him drinking and kicking back in the harem and apparently insulted Turkey’s ancestors in so doing. At least that is what the Deputy Prime Minister thought when he issued a cryptic warning about ‘retribution’ for those who humiliate important people from ‘our’ history. (I didn't know you could humiliate people dead for hundreds of years.) There were lots of similar stories; students being sued by the Prime Minister for a satire that ‘insulted’ him; A ‘freakish’ statue the government wants torn down; More seriously, 50 journalists in jail waiting trial for various offenses.

Together they are evidence of the serious concern secular Turks have about the AKP government and it's agenda to Islamicize the country - to impose their views and ways. Is that their goal? Time will tell. The AKP says it is not. They say that is exactly what the other side (Kemalists) has been doing for decades. They are just trying to give devout Muslims the freedom they have been long denied. They have a point. Atatürk did constrain liberty and impose a culture. The fear is that Islamists elsewhere (read Iran) have such a poor record of embracing liberty. Could these Islamists (AKP) actually be tolerant? If so that would be dramatic progress.  Secular Turks seem unwilling to take the chance. They see the AKP’s tolerance (so far) as a mask that will be worn just until power is consolidated.

It is an interesting drama to watch from the luxurious safety of a free country.