Abstract
Faruk Bildirici
ON 2 APRIL 2019, hours after it emerged that a government opposition candidate had won Istanbul’s mayoral election, the website of Hürriyet devoted its coverage to the false claim that the vote was rigged.
Each of the 15 articles showcased on the newspaper’s website that day repeated the unfounded theory that Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Nation Alliance candidate of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the İYİ Party didn’t win. The newspaper refused to report the official tally which showed he had triumphed, albeit with a margin of less than three-tenths of a percentage point (13,700 votes), and ignored statements issued by the opposition.
“The CHP is in panic”, one Hürriyet article claimed, repeating a statement by a spokesperson for the rival Justice and Development Party (AKP), which governs nationally. “Interesting development: the CHP has stopped the count,” another article warned. “We have identified obvious malpractices,” a third piece said, quoting AKP’s municipal leader in Ankara, another city where the governing party lost to the opposition.
The book by Faruk Bildirici titled: The Ombudsman of the Media, the Media of the Palace
Such untruths aren’t uncommon from Turkey’s government-controlled public broadcasters. But the paper-of-record’s choice to devote all its coverage to cancelling the 2019 elections surprised Hürriyet’s long-term readers.
Just three weeks earlier, Faruk Bildirici, a veteran Turkish journalist and the last readers’ editor, or the ombudsman of Hürriyet, had left the institution that had employed him for 27 years. “I started writing this book shortly after the takeover [by the pro-government Demiroren Group],” Bildirici notes in his introduction to The Ombudsman of the Media, the Media of the Palace, a tell-all book that chronicles in remarkable detail the behind-the-scenes story of the transformation of a pillar of Turkish journalism into the most devoted defender of Turkey’s current government. “I realised I wouldn’t be able to stay there for long. I started collecting belongings from my office and gathering my notes and my archive. As I began to set my experiences, struggles and discussions on paper, I tried to be as objective as possible... and preferred noting down events, leaving the task of interpretation to readers.”
The result is a devastating indictment of Turkey’s ruling party’s tactics of stifling the country’s journalism. The 352-page book also solidifies Bildirici’s unprecedented role as ombudsman turned whistleblower.
“No, I didn’t fear the consequences,” Bildirici told Index about his decision to lift the veil behind the country’s most powerful media group, owned since 2018 by the Demirören family who are close to the president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
In preparing his exposé, Bildirici sent all the relevant chapters to figures they mention to allow his subjects to add their own views and correct possible factual mistakes. “Most of the people in the book were friends and executives I’ve worked with for many years... Communicating with them helped save the book from being one-sided.” He fact-checked all the stories in his book, treating them like newspaper articles written by other reporters. Bildirici even sent a draft to Hürriyet’s previous publisher, Aydın Doğan, under whose watch the paper became the “flagship of Turkish journalism” that had rattled governments since the 1990s.
A childhood trauma motivated Bildirici, who is 65, to become a muckraker. In the fifth grade, his teacher allowed him to visit the police headquarters of Gaziantep, his hometown, to interview the police chief for the school paper.
He treated Bildirici and his friends well, offering chocolate and soda. Then a limping man was rushed into his office. “The chief suddenly raised his voice: ‘Which leg of yours hurts?’ When the roughed-up young man reluctantly showed his right leg, the chief kicked it with all his might. I couldn’t believe the sight. I was terrified. The portly man who minutes ago was entertaining us had gone, replaced by a barbarian who could hit a young man... I couldn’t take my eyes off the kicked leg.”
That day Bildirici promised to become a journalist and “chronicle how people were mistreated” in Turkey.
Bildirici’s first office job was at Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s oldest newspaper. When he started working at the Ankara bureau in June 1980, the veteran journalist Hasan Cemal (sentenced to 18 months in jail in 2018) was one of its top editors. Just three months later, a military coup shook the nation. On the evening of 12 September 1980, Cemal gave Bildirici and his colleagues in the Cumhuriyet office a warning: “Journalists are witnesses of their era. But these are extraordinary times. We won’t be able to report on many of the issues. For that reason I advise you to take notes on everything. You can turn them into books later.”
Bildirici took Cemal’s advice. As General Kenan Evren’s rule transformed Turkey and independent journalists came under attack, Bildirici devised ways to make sure stories reached the world.
One day he leaked a cassette to a BBC colleague, an early instance of his enthusiasm for whistleblowing. “Shortly after the coup, when journalists were taken into the Mamak Military Prison, foreign journalists weren’t allowed inside,” Bildirici writes. “I went there with a modern recorder that operated with a tiny cassette. Before the press briefing, I recorded the footsteps of imprisoned youth who were made to walk in single file. The next day’s BBC bulletin opened with that audio recording.”
The exposé infuriated Evren’s media commissars but Bildirici avoided being found out. In October 1992, he began working for Hürriyet, in whose pages he published a groundbreaking report on a phone-tapping scandal (the subject of his debut book, The Country of Secret Ears, which came out in 1998), and coined the word “telekulak” that describes the practice of tapping the phones of reporters. He excelled at writing profiles of Turkey’s public figures and called them “Puzzle Portraits”.
Bildirici’s journey as readers’ editor began on 19 April 2010, after Enis Berberoğlu, a highly regarded Hürriyet journalist (sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2017) became the paper’s editor. Bildirici felt “a new era had begun”, happy to see the paper showing self-confidence to face all sorts of institutional critiques. At the time, four titles in the Turkish press employed readers’ editors, and the ethics of journalism was becoming an important subject regularly discussed in columns.
Among the problems he flagged early on were product placements and other types of paid advertisements which he considered “a betrayal against journalism”. Bildirici strived to make his criticisms constructive, sending his columns to his editor each Sunday morning, often mellowing the language to keep complaints at bay.
But soon after Bildirici’s columns appeared, the newspaper’s executives began to intervene, asking the Ombudsman to remove parts of his criticisms to avoid angering their subjects.
“I said, ‘What are you doing, Faruk? Can you get real results here?’ No, I couldn’t, because in Turkey the media has these ties to sources of power. But then I reached another conclusion. Maybe it was a struggle I couldn’t win but the struggle itself had value.
“So I began a fight I knew I couldn’t win... A few months after becoming the ombudsman, I started taking notes of everything. These are the notes I’ve used in the book.”
Bildirici’s book encompasses a decade when the Doğan Media Group which owned Hürriyet came under government assault in the form of a $2.5 billion tax fine and pressure to sack its critical columnists. “I couldn’t address everything because my main focus was journalistic mistakes,”
Bildirici recalled. He compiled readers’ complaints into reports and submitted them to editors. Among his successes were changes made to the language used when reporting suicides, but on many other fronts his advice was ignored.
Meanwhile, the ruling party’s ire toward his paper had reached boiling point. On 6 September 2015, a ruling party MP encouraged his supporters to raid the newspaper’s headquarters. That evening, a group of 200 party members occupied the building, wielding sticks and throwing stones. Bildirici remembers how they “chanted slogans, attacked the security booth at the entrance, and burned the Hürriyet flag... the police merely watched and did nothing”. Afterwards the MP mounted a car and addressed his supporters, thanking them for defending the “national will”.
Two days later, the mob attacked Hürriyet again. This time they brought guns, too. Four shots were heard. “The assailants entered the garden. Using stones and sticks they destroyed the barriers, the cameras, the gates and the windows.” The paper’s editor ran to the television studio nearby.
“I’ve been a journalist for 40 years,” he told viewers. For the first time I felt my life was in danger.”
Bildirici was in Ankara during the raid. “What was more concerning for me was the stance of executives... I’d like to see them openly criticise the attack.” The assailants walked free while Hürriyet executives tried to find middle ground with the government. At the end of the same month, one of the paper’s star columnists was attacked in front of his apartment in central Istanbul. Four thugs broke his nose and ribs by punching and kicking him.
Terrified by such violence, Hürriyet tried to keep out of the government’s way. It didn’t work. When the paper interviewed Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk in February 2017, the editor briefed the reporter “to stay out of politics and restrict the interview to literary subjects”, according to Bildirici. A constitutional referendum was looming and Pamuk told the interviewer he’d vote against the government’s plan. The paper refused to publish the interview.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is responsible for the appalling state of press freedom in Turkey
Another interview, conducted with novelist Ahmet Ümit, met a similar fate: 80,000 printed copies of the paper were pulped at the last moment when a pro-government executive noticed the interview’s headline, which he calculated might upset the governing party.
In 2018, the pro-government Demirören Group agreed to purchase Hürriyet. The pressures on the company magically disappeared. The bill, about $675 million, would be taken care of by the state-owned Ziraat Bankasi in the form of a loan. Bildirici resigned soon after the takeover. In his farewell article, published on 4 March 2019, he wrote: “I’ve always wanted journalism to triumph. It didn’t do so today, but it most certainly will tomorrow.”
Bildirici says publishing his tell-all book allowed him to “come to terms with my own shortcomings. Because transparency empowers, not weakens”. By exposing the behind-the-scenes events at a long-respected institution, he has performed a public duty.
“I’ve always believed that journalism is about transparency and that all its machinations should be known by everyone, that everyone has the right to know what we’re doing, and knowing about what is happening behind the scenes is a public right.” Glad to have kept true to his childhood promise to reveal injustices, Bildirici said: “I did nothing secretly. I’m not an agent. I’m not a cop. I’m a journalist. I’ve always been open. All my acts strive to meet the standards of journalism.”