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About two years ago I was sipping tea in the office on a slow news Sunday when I got a call from security: "The police are here. They say they are taking over the newspaper." The police? Taking over? I was the Ankara bureau chief of Turkey's second-largest daily, Sabah, and felt invincible. But within minutes, plainclothes officers filled my room, explaining that there was a simultaneous raid at the newspaper's headquarters in Istanbul and that from now on the paper would be run by the Savings and Deposit Insurance Fund.
What?
The paper was indeed run by a government agency and over the course of the next six months I, the editor in chief, and some of the columnists were sacked or had to leave. (The legal argument for the takeover of the Ciner publishing group, which owned Sabah and other titles and had 3,000 employees, was that a document was not disclosed to the authorities six years previously when the newspaper changed hands.) Sabah was subsequently sold to a company where the Turkish prime minister's son-in-law is the CEO in a bid subsidized by state banks.
Today, that paper, for which I worked many years as a reporter, New York correspondent and, finally, the Ankara bureau chief, has an unwavering pro-government line. The Sabah incident was not an isolated case, as Turkey's government has pressured and strong-armed media barons to create a complain-at-your-own-risk environment.
It came as no surprise last week when Turkey's largest media group, Dogan—a conglomerate of newspapers, magazines and television stations including CNN's Turkey affiliate—was slapped with a colossal $2.5 billion tax fine by inspectors following a public feud with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey's ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) has long been angered by the secular Dogan media's coverage. But the showdown came right before the local elections last spring, when Mr. Erdogan lashed out at Dogan newspapers for reporting about a corruption case involving an Islamic charity close to AKP.
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