Erdoğan’s words were distorted

The news report in the Türkiye newspaper bore the headline: “Erdoğan evaluated the attack on Özel: I hope he learns a lesson from what happened.”

This report was immediately cited by many sites, including Cumhuriyet, Halk TV, and Haber3, with headlines such as “From Erdoğan to Özel, who was attacked: I hope he learns the necessary lesson.” It was even asked to CHP Chairman Özgür Özel in this manner, and a response was obtained from him.

However, as Ahmet Hakan also emphasized in his column in Hürriyet, the headline of the Türkiye newspaper's report and the information within it did not match. According to the report, Erdoğan had stated at his party's Central Executive Board (MYK) meeting that the violence against Özel was unacceptable, and then said, “I hope those who want to drag politics onto the ground of violence will learn a lesson from these events.”

It is very clear that the addressee of these words was not Özel, but “those who want to drag politics onto the ground of violence.” Therefore, the headline used by the Türkiye newspaper was wrong. Citing the Türkiye newspaper's report just by looking at its headline, without paying attention to the sentence inside and without correcting it, is an even greater mistake. Moreover, writing that Erdoğan “declared” these words as if he had spoken them at an open meeting is just the icing on the cake…

The incorrect headline, and the continuation of the same error in the citations, not only provided the reader with inaccurate information but also contributed to the increase in the existing tension in politics.

Whatever happened to Akşener becoming Erdoğan’s deputy?

Do you remember, after the former spokesperson of the İYİ Party, Kürşad Zorlu, joined the AKP, “backstage” news had flourished again; there were those talking about dozens of deputies who would join the AKP, and those voicing various claims about the party's former leader Meral Akşener.

Sözcü TV Main News Anchor Fatih Portakal was also announcing that Akşener had reached an agreement with President Erdoğan and would become his deputy:

“It seems certain that Akşener will become Vice President. You know, the AKP's grand congress is on February 23. In March, Meral Akşener will also be in the new cabinet as Vice President. We will hear her name.

She already sent the men around her first. In the coming days, Ünal Karaman will also cross over. Let me share that with you clearly as well. This is nothing but a lack of stance. It's a pity.

Will Cevdet Yılmaz continue or not? I don't know if there will be a second Vice President? But it has been finalized that Meral Akşener will also become Vice President. Hands have been shaken. Let's say good luck.”

Fatih Portakal was speaking as if the appointments regarding Akşener and Yılmaz were finalized; he didn't even leave room for probability while reporting. But the AKP congress came and went, neither the ministers changed nor was Cevdet Yılmaz replaced. And Akşener still hasn't become Vice President.

At that time, others also wrote and talked about Akşener becoming Vice President. And they did so without any concrete basis or data. They likely wrote it based on the chatter of some people who were not in President Erdoğan’s inner circle.

A journalist should not write or say everything that comes to mind or everything they hear without verifying it. Otherwise, they mislead their readers and viewers. Furthermore, developments regarding “backstage news” should be followed, and if they turn out to be wrong, corrective reports should be made.

A fake media association

The sentence that remained in my mind from President Erdoğan’s long speech about who is a journalist was this:

“The media, which strengthens our democracy, has a place on our heads even if it is in opposition to our government.”

He said this, but as can be predicted, there wasn't a single opposition journalist invited to watch the ceremony where he spoke, let alone receive an award. Plenty of awards were distributed to the pro-government media.

In fact, Sinan Burhan, the president of the Turkey Press Federation, which organized the ceremony called the “10th Anatolian Media Awards,” is also an AKP member. He served as a municipal council member from the AKP in Ankara for a period and also applied for parliamentary candidacy. He is one of the regulars of Erdoğan’s foreign trips.

What they call the Press Federation was first the “Anatolian Broadcasters Association”; in 2023, the “association” went, and the “federation” came. Two months ago, with the support of President Erdoğan and Communications Director Fahrettin Altun, and the approval of Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, they took the name “Turkey”; they also transformed “broadcasters” into “press.”

However, it is unclear whether it is a journalism organization, a solidarity union for media owners, or who its members are. On their website, only the information that “TÜBAF is an effective non-governmental organization that houses 320 local and regional radio, television, digital media, newspapers, and magazines” is provided. The names of those media organizations are not there either.

Instead, they list events supporting President Erdoğan and the AKP on their site. In short, we are not facing a professional journalism organization, but a fake media association that the government has created and is trying to feed and grow. Unfortunately, the name “Turkey” is just makeup.

Pornographic language in child abuse

The sexual abuse of seven children at a music course in Tarsus was reported with the headline: “They lived through the apocalypse at the music course! The horror was inflicted by saying ‘Let’s play the blindfold game’.” Right below it, it read: “All the details of the abuse that will make your blood run cold are in Gerçek Gündem for the first time.”

Indeed, the report contained the address of the music course where the abuse took place, the name of the person accused of abusing, and his photograph; it didn't stop there, and based on the children's statements, the sexual abuse was recounted in all its details. The process of abuse was also narrated in the introduction of the report.

When Seyhan Avşar, who wrote the report, shared what she wrote in the report on X using the same language, criticisms came from journalists Özlem Akarsu Çelik, Candan Yıldız, Banu Güven, Alican Uludağ, and the female employees of the BirGün newspaper. In summary, the wrongness of “presenting the severe traumas that children are subjected to by reducing them to almost pornographic details” was emphasized; it was reminded that “this news language does not serve the public interest, journalistic ethics, and the principle of the best interest of the child that the law tries to protect.” The families also conveyed their discomfort with the report to her.

Afterward, Avşar stated that she took the criticisms into account and deleted her post. But she kept the report exactly as it was, without any changes. Since she agreed with the criticisms, she should have primarily corrected the report, especially by deleting the lines where the details of the abuse were described in a pornographic language.

The report does not protect those children who were abused, but rather exposes them; it normalizes sexual abuse with pornographic language and creates a digital footprint that will harm the children in the future.

Is “sexually explicit material” a crime?

The police raid on a nightclub in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district was announced in the media with headlines such as “Raid on the perverted slave party” and “Whipping in a cage, tying with handcuffs.”

The report on NTV said, “It was determined that a woman was put in a cage in a slave position at the party and whipped by customers who paid money.” In Akşam, Milliyet, and Hürriyet, it was written: “Those who organized a sexually explicit perverted party in Beyoğlu were caught in a police raid.”

Similar expressions were also used in other media organizations. “The police seized sexually explicit material,” perversion, obscenity, indecency, etc…

However, the organizers Tolga T. and Laden S., who were among the eight people arrested in the operation in Beyoğlu on October 23, 2024, must have been released shortly after, as they were caught and arrested once again in an operation carried out by the police in Kadıköy two months later; they had organized a “lewd party” again. Most of the photos in the reports of the two operations were the same.

These reports had been forgotten in the archive. The report titled “Acquittal for the whipped cage party,” published in Hürriyet last week, brought these operations back to the agenda. Tolga T. and Laden S., who were being tried with a request for an 11-year prison sentence, were acquitted; the “sexual fantasy products seized in the operation were also returned on the grounds that they did not constitute a crime!”

I hope those who wrote and published those reports will also look back and engage in self-criticism. Because even though there was no crime, they supported those operations and exposed people to the public. It may not be to someone's liking from a moral perspective, but it is also wrong for journalists to portray such parties as a crime and to report on the raids using police jargon and support the operations. One should not confuse journalism with moral policing.

In a single sentence:

• Sabah, Milliyet, and Posta newspapers moved the “raise difference that retirees will receive” to the front page instead of the inflation rate; Akşam and Türkiye emphasized that annual inflation has fallen; Yeni Şafak, on the other hand, diverged from other pro-government newspapers by saying, “Inflation is marking time.”

• Milliyet’s use of photos related to the moment the male murderer held a gun to the woman’s head and fired in its “Brutality frame by frame” report like a photo-novel was violence pornography.

• Just as it was rude and wrong for Yılmaz Özdil to say “He is wandering around like a pear” to CHP Chairman Özgür Özel as a journalist, it was just as unbecoming for Özel to say to Özdil, “They will make a person eat that reverse gear.”

• Hürriyet published the promotional meeting of a hair care brand in New York as a tabloid news story with the headline “They met in New York.”

• The information that Milli Gazete Editor-in-Chief Mustafa Kurdaş was appointed as the advisor to the Saadet Party Chairman and that the managing editor would now manage the newspaper was announced at the party’s “Strategy and Move meeting”; that announcement was also made into a news story in the newspaper.

• The use of the headline “From where to where! He was one of the most popular names of a period, he fell as far as shopping malls” for the artist Nez on Haberler.com was demeaning.

• Hürriyet wrote in its headline “He followed step by step” that “CNN Türk’s footage revealed that the attack was planned,” but that footage belonged to ANKA.

• It was misleading for NTV, Karar, and TGRT Haber to write “Is the right to a green passport coming for accountants?” and for Ensonhaber and Sözcü to write “The right to a green passport is coming for accountants”; because the probability of the proposal coming from the opposition becoming law is very low.

• Nefes coded the name of the “famous” and convicted author as A.T. in its report “Famous author sentenced to two years in prison,” but it did not need to hide the name Atilla Tuygan.

• On Haber Global, the reporter describing the metro accident in Istanbul repeated seven times during his few-minute speech that one person died in the accident.

• The “promotional” interview series of Yiğit Çağlayan, the CEO of a financial company, continued on the economy pages of Sabah after Dünya and Hürriyet.

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