Abstract
Female reporters are being demonised, to the point that some have received death threats and one has fled the country, says
Women journalists are regularly told to “know their place” by state officials, newspaper editors and opinion leaders who are calling the shots in the political establishment and the media. It is as if, with every incident, a strong message is being sent to women: leave the field of politics to those who know how to handle it with the care it deserves. In other words, leave it to your male colleagues. As a male journalist who lives in Istanbul and sees the treatment of my female colleagues, I find this intimidating.
On the day right-wing newspapers called her a traitor, Ceylan Yeğinsu, Turkish correspondent of The New York Times received multiple death threats through email and Twitter messages. Yeğinsu was the most recent victim of intimidation of women writers by Turkish newspapers. Her NYT report on Islamic State’s recruitment activities in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, had rubbed up the authorities the wrong way. The NYT, which argued for Turkey to play a more active role in the coalition against the IS, had placed Yeğinsu’s piece on its front page with a picture that showed Turkey’s president and the prime minister leaving the Haci Bayram mosque. This mosque houses the cenotaph of the founder of the Bayrami Sufi sect. The selection of the picture was problematic from the start. Some pious Turks, who were irritated by the NYT’s implication of a formal relationship between IS, the Republic of Turkey and the mosque in whose neighbourhood the IS recruiters allegedly worked, took to Twitter to express their frustration.
This was not exactly an extraordinary event. Every day newspapers publish articles some readers find disturbing. So it was not unusual to see outraged Turkish state officials accuse the NYT of acting shamelessly, hours after the publication of Yeğinsu’s piece. The extraordinary development came the following morning when hundreds of thousands of readers saw the front pages of right-wing newspapers which announced, in capital letters, that the real culprit of the NYT debate was the reporter, Yeğinsu, rather than the NYT editors. Apparently she needed to be taught a lesson. Yeğinsu, who had carried interviews with IS recruiters for her piece, did not report that there was a connection between the mosque and the IS. But right-wing papers framed her as portraying the mosque as a recruitment centre of IS militants. She was accused of something she had not done.
Women journalists in Turkey have been subject to aggressive personal campaigns in the press and on social media
Credit: Brett Biedscheid, www.statetostate.co.uk
Why the blatant attempt at slandering a fellow journalist? Perhaps male editors were outraged to see that a woman, in her early 30s, could write unsettling things about issues the Turkish state preferred to overlook.
Yeğinsu was subjected to a flood of emails and Twitter messages. Many tweets threatened her with drowning, and there were endless threats of rape. Having no previous experience of dealing with such a co-ordinated campaign, Yeğinsu went into hiding. She took a plane to New York and spent weeks there before heading back to Istanbul.
Calling a journalist a traitor, labelling her work as betrayal against her own people are the gravest accusations one can make to dishonour her
Although the NYT published a correction on 17 September (“Neither that mosque nor the president’s visit were related to the recruiting of ISIS fighters described in the article,” it read) and then removed the picture from its website (“A picture with an earlier version of this article, which showed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu leaving a mosque in August, was published in error”) those gestures did little to stop the intimidation campaign against her.
The way Yeğinsu was silenced had been eerily similar to other recent cases of intimidation of Turkey’s women journalists. The BBC’s Selin Girit had been targeted the same way, and by the same newspapers, in 2013. The crime Girit had committed was similar: she was reporting from a forum where protestors discussed ways of fighting the state. If people stopped consuming, the protesters suggested, the state would have no other choice but to listen to their demands. Girit quoted this on her Twitter feed and this was enough to get her into trouble. She was also personally attacked by the mayor of Ankara, Melih Gökçek, on social media. She was nicknamed alternately as “English Selin” and “Agent Selin”. Newspapers used her image on their front pages with the same emphasis on her treachery. This was followed by numerous rape and death threats on Twitter.
Another Turkish correspondent, the BBC’s Rengin Arslan, had her moment of intimidation after she interviewed two wives of miners after the mining disaster in the city of Soma on 13 May 2014. One of the interviewees severely criticised the state for its handling of the situation. Right-wing papers accused Arslan of finding left-wing activists from another city, bringing them into Soma and donning headscarves before asking them to act as if they were wives of miners.
“As the government responds to such cases in a more muscular way, people’s reactions to women journalists also began to change,” says Onur Burçak Belli, a freelance journalist. “People [have] become more fearful about sharing their knowledge and opinions with women journalists. This had been my experience in the past two years. The authorities can prosecute you because of your work, and go on to prosecute your interviewees as well.”
Belli, a journalist who has worked for the BBC, now files reports for Al Jazeera English and Al Monitor from Turkey’s border with Syria, where she is covering the humanitarian crisis in the region. “As a women journalist ‘doing a man’s job’, you sit at traditional coffee houses with men, smoke cigarettes with or before them, travel through hills and paths with male fighters at night … and most of the time you are considered as weak, vulnerable, even despicable by some,” she says. “I always feel that these are a reaction to our power of evaluating incidents from a woman’s point of view.”
Belli describes how men respond when women journalists confront issues in ways they don’t agree with. “They find such things humiliating, as if they are being brought down,” she says. “They react to those with counterattacks. What is even worse for them is ‘being brought down’ by a woman. Women are considered to have a sanctified place in gender-oriented societies as mothers, sisters and wives. This leads to harsher reactions against women. They are not expected to meddle in issues they are not entitled to. They are told to know their place in society.”
People [have] become more fearful about sharing their knowledge and opinions with women journalists
Women journalists and columnists, such as Amberin Zaman, Turkish correspondent of The Economist and Nuray Mert, a vocal critic of the government, have been grilled on social media in similar cases. There appears to be few legal ramifications for those who made the threats, or the editors responsible for publishing them. The only exception so far has been the cases opened by activists, who were accused of acting as miners’ wives in Arslan’s report. They successfully sued newspapers that made the accusations and courts ordered the removal of the articles.
Women journalists in Turkey are not keen to make a fuss. This is understandable. After all, they are not artists, novelists or opinion leaders who voice their views about the world. They are journalists who report on it. They want to report the news in an impartial way, rather than become the news and taking sides. Women novelists have also been targeted by the same papers. The novelist Elif Shafak, for example, was subjected to media grilling when a newspaper put pictures of her and other writers on its front page, under the heading “Their sneaking, insults and arrogance know no bounds: they cannot be human.” The previous day Shafak had published an article in The Guardian in which she wrote about Turkish state’s long history of intimidating dissidents. It seems as if women writers, be they novelists or journalists, have become the favourite traitors of Turkish society.
“Treason is just another phenomenon in the cultures of nationalist states,” Belli says. “Calling a journalist a traitor, labelling her work as betrayal against her own people are the gravest accusations one can make to dishonour her. When you accuse someone of treason, there is not much chance of a comeback from it.”
Women under pressure
Incidents of intimidation of female journalists in Turkey have been reported to Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project, which has been running since February 2014. Below we include some examples of incidents that have been posted to the map.
Turkey’s first and only openly transgender television reporter Michelle Demishevich was fired from Turkey’s IMC TV following alleged disputes with management over her make-up and clothing, although IMC denies this. Demishevich told Bianet, an independent Turkish press agency based in Istanbul, that while she worked for IMC she was not given insurance and worked long hours for low pay.
Journalist Arzu Geybullayeva has received threats via social media over the past year. Geybullayeva writes for the Armenian-language newspaper Agos, which is based in Istanbul. The threats came after an interview she gave to an Azerbaijani website. She was then criticised by the Azerbaijani media, for working for an Armenian newspaper.
A woman journalist for Iranian broadcaster Press TV was killed in a car crash in Şanlıurfa province, near the Turkish-Syrian border, in October. Serena Shim had been reporting on Islamic State militants crossing into Turkey. According to a report on Reuters, Hamid Reza Emadi, head of Press TV’s newsroom, said in an interview on the television station, “Her death is very suspect and it is likely an outcome of her critical expository reports of the adverse impact of Turkish and Saudi policies on Syrian refugees.” Reuters reported that the governor of Şanlıurfa province rejected the allegations but said that Shim’s death is being investigated. All cases can be viewed at mediafreedom.ushahidi.com
Aimée Hamilton
