ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ
o.cengiz@todayszaman.com
I would actually like to write about something else, but the same subject is haunting me again and again. My fellow journalists are losing their 
jobs one by one and I feel obliged to address this question time after time.
My friend Yavuz Baydar, who is also a columnist for Today’s Zaman and an ombudsperson of the Sabah daily, just lost his job with Sabah. We were traveling from İstanbul to Edremit on Tuesday. Shortly after we landed in Edremit, he got a phone call from the human resources department of his newspaper and immediately flew back to İstanbul. When he went back he was given written notice terminating his contract. Sabah refused to publish Yavuz’s last two articles; namely, he was about to be fired at any moment. However, in the written notice he was given a different reason for the termination of his contract. They said his recent article in The New York Times, criticizing media bosses for their contribution to the plight of the situation of media freedom in Turkey, was harming the reputation of their newspaper.
Yavuz told me that after he was fired, only two of his colleagues from Sabah called him to say they were sorry. One of them was from the editorial team, the other was fellow columnist Emre Aköz. We have just learnt that Aköz’s column in Sabah was also censored. He is one of those rare people who still dare to criticize the government in the newspaper.
There are now some rumors circulating that there is a new wave of firings ahead for Sabah and Milliyet columnists. Apparently the government does not want to see any criticism in the “mainstream” media.
There is this weird situation here in Turkey: Ultranationalist and some Kemalist newspapers run quite harsh criticisms, even insulting remarks, of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government day in and day out. The government is not concerned with them at all. However, they are extremely sensitive about any criticism which has the potential of reaching their electorate.
I saw an interesting comment on this situation on Twitter saying that the government is not concerned with those who swear at them but is very sensitive about friendly criticism against them — that is to say, any criticism which has the potential to influence their electorate.
We cannot understand how suffocating the media atmosphere is here in Turkey right now by simply analyzing the government’s intolerant attitude. What Yavuz said about his colleagues’ reaction is another element heightening this atmosphere. Many people simply turn a blind eye to injustices done to their friends; they don’t even call them. There is another thing: This ever-growing army of unemployed journalists cannot find jobs in other media outlets. Once you are fired for “political reasons” you have quite a difficult time finding work in another newspaper. From Hasan Cemal to Mehmet Altan, there are so many veteran journalists and columnists who either do not write anywhere or pen articles free of charge for web news portals.
There are of course some circles in the media who try to show this human eating machine as though it is a routine in which newspapers just try to get rid of people with whom they are not satisfied. The current situation is far from this; so many media outlets are willing to sacrifice their most popular writers and anchors just to avoid angering the government for this or that reason. So many media bosses have very profitable other businesses with the government. Their dependency lies at the heart of the problem. The media ship in Turkey has long passed the stage at which it was sending out an SOS; it is now simply sinking!