Banner outside an Istanbul TV station on 2 June 2013 depict Turkish broadcasters as the three wise monkeys who see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil. Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP
Turkey, with a dozen big TV stations, 50 or so nationally available newspapers and hundreds of local radio operations, ought to be a paradise of media pluralism, providing a range of coverage that underpins its democracy. No big, bad Murdochs and other overseas tycoons; just public-spirited Turkish proprietors supporting press freedoms. So why, last week, were the great angry crowds who flooded out of Taksim Square onto our own front pages painfully missing for so long on Turkish television or from the headlines of powerful papers such as Sabah?
Because pluralism can also be weakness when a government wants to play rough. If you're a businessman who bought a paper – possibly for the most altruistic reasons – then it's not there to harm your other interests. Yet watch state contracts you might have won go elsewhere. Wait for the moment the taxman pays a sudden call. Expect broadcasting licences to have a very temporary feel. Remember, in short, that an elected government exercising what Lord Hailsham used to call "elective dictatorship" has dozens of ways of making proprietors squirm, trim and dispose of brave editors or outspoken columnists. Remember the 70 or more journalists still in prison.
The crowds of young, bright and furious Turks who protested outside TV stations last week told their own saddening story. A press and broadcasting regime that throws a blanket of discretion over political life, one that doesn't reflect the facts everybody who lives in Istanbul, Ankara and cities beyond knows, is a system that can't be trusted: and, without that trust, the government itself has no means of asserting its own democratic authority.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been elected three times and those votes give the prime minister great legitimacy. But such legitimacy also depends on the existence of the continuing pillars of democracy – including press and judicial freedom. And there, as we now see, the AKP government, rigging the terms of trade backstage, has brought a hubble-bubble of shame and trouble on itself. If there is no faith in the mechanisms of freedom when things go wrong, then people take to the streets. Repression doesn't need to be crude to bring dire consequences. Bullying the weak, frightened, craven and diverse backstage will serve quite well enough.
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