Epistemic trusteeship and those who do not bow

The history of censorship in Turkey is the history of the desire of those in power to control information. The pre-publication censorship of the printing press under Abdul Hamid II, and the advertising embargoes and economic pressures directed at the press during the Democrat Party era, are reflections of the collective consciousness of governments regarding speech and facts. In every major rupture or turning point in Turkey's political history, the press has faced immense pressure. The carrot-and-stick policy toward the press continues today through judicial decisions, license revocations, advertising bans, and the appointment of trustees.

In the digital age, censorship is being rewritten in its most refined form: algorithmic control, judicial censorship, and epistemic trusteeship. Today, censorship is operated through legal and administrative tools. RTÜK fines, TMSF trusteeships, and access blocks via court orders… The concept used in communication literature to explain this structure is authoritarian media management. In this management style, the media functions as an apparatus that reproduces the state's political legitimacy.

The seizure of a television channel during a live broadcast, the detention and arrest of journalists in the early hours of the morning, and the blocking of news portals… These have now become normalized. Censorship has become a form of "epistemic" domination that recklessly infiltrates the networks of information production and circulation. For this reason, we are now talking about epistemic trusteeship, that is, the seizure of society's right to know, understand, and remember.

Epistemic trusteeship is the direct political and judicial control of the field of information production—news, commentary, analysis, and broadcasting. At first glance, the concept of a "trustee" appears to be an administrative arrangement. However, at the point we have reached today, the appointment of a trustee to a media organization is not merely a change of ownership. This is an epistemic seizure regarding the mode of information production, how a piece of news is presented, and even which words can be used.

The deletion of a channel's archive is an intervention in the collective memory of society. The detention, accusation, and arrest of a journalist is the punishment of the collective right to know. It is the placing of information production and circulation under political surveillance. In this way, an attempt is made to create a media order that reflects how the public is expected to think. The production and dissemination of information are reorganized through the cooperation of capital, law, and politics. This process is also accompanied by Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic violence." While a portion of the press is liquidated, the remaining ones are brought into line under the guise of "controlled pluralism"; the fact that RTÜK, which should be an institution protecting "broadcasting principles," functions as an extension of political control, is a process where the closing or blacking out of a channel has become an ideological disciplinary mechanism. In this context, epistemic trusteeship is a move by hegemonic power to seize the cultural sphere. It is the effort of "those who cannot manage to seize cultural power" to establish cultural hegemony through pressure and the law.

The legalization of political priorities leads us to the concept of "judicial censorship." In this order, where the law is drawn into power relations, court decisions turn into tools of censorship. Judicial censorship is the criminalization of dissenting voices through the instrumentalization of the law. When a television channel is blacked out, a news site is blocked, or a journalist is summoned to testify, it is all carried out "according to the law," "within the framework of regulations," and "in the name of public interest." A piece of news is banned without being declared a "state secret," a tweet is removed on the grounds of "inciting the public to hatred and hostility," and a television channel is blacked out on the claim that it "threatens national security." In reality, they want to bring the entire society under control, wanting us to watch penguins and order meatballs. Consequently, Turkey is currently ranked 159th in international press freedom indices.

Press freedom is the citizen's right to know. The increasing pressure on the media, the high number of detained journalists, and the climate of fear created by successive arrests are also reflected in the citizens. The silence of a society accustomed to news of detentions begins to become a source of legitimacy for the government. Silence is seen as consent. Forgetting and making others forget are the oldest allies of those in power. And a society's media structure is a mirror reflecting that society's understanding of governance. If only the image of the government is visible in that mirror, we are now talking about a managed information regime. For this reason, society should not leave the defense of truth solely to journalists. Resisting all of this means taking ownership of the socialization of truth. What is heartening is that there are still those who do not bow. There are those who say, "We do not bow." There are those who resist the silencing of the collective voice of truth.

Journalists will continue to write and tell the truth even in the dark. And no period of censorship and pressure is eternal. Censorship, trustees, and judicial pressure are all temporary. Every blackout will dissipate one day. When that day comes, the name of this era will be written once again as "the years when truth was attempted to be seized by trustees."