Media capture strategies in new authoritarian states: the case of Turkey
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Media capture strategies in new authoritarian states: the case of Turkey Gülçin Balamir Co¸skun
Received: 26 May 2020 / Accepted: 7 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article focuses on the forced transformation of the mass media as an institution in new authoritarian states. It aims to understand the methods used by theses states to control and manipulate the flux of news through the mass media. Turkey’s media system has been chosen as a case study because the recent political developments in the country offer worrisome und devastating examples. This article aims to answer to the following question: How can we classify methods and strategies used by the AKP government to capture the media in Turkey? Why and how do the methods used by the AKP government differ from those applied by previous governments? To answer to these questions, the article draws on media capture as a framework of analysis. It argues that the AKP captured the media by using new strategies which can be divided into three overlapping and interconnected categories: capture by creating its own private media, capture through financial sanctions, and capture by intimidating and criminalizing journalists. Keywords Media capture · Turkey · AKP · Ownership · Financial sanctions · Criminalizing journalists
1 Introduction The 21st century started with the rise of a new kind of authoritarian regime that hides behind institutional façades of representative democracy in different parts of the world, from Latin America to Europe and Asia. This new phenomenon called into doubt previous optimistic analyses of the worldwide transition to democracy Dr. G. B. Co¸skun () Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany E-Mail: [email protected]
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and pushed political scientists to think about the relationship between democratic institutions and authoritarian transformation. Some scholars prefer to define these new kinds of regime as authoritarian electoral regimes that “neither practice democracy nor resort regularly to naked repression” (Schedler 2002, p. 36) while others name them “illiberal democracies” (Buzogány 2017; Plattner 2019; Zakaria 1997) or “competitive authoritarianism” (Levitsky and Way 2002). Although there is no agreement on how to characterize today’s undemocratic regimes, there is “an emerging consensus on one important insight: the process of autocratization seems to have changed” (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019, p. 1097). New authoritarian regimes do not reject democracy itself, they reduce it to majoritarianism. Although they retain the electoral system, they tend to change the rules of the game and to transform or destroy political institutions such as the legislature, independent courts, elections, political parties, the media, civil society, and subnational units (cf. Schedler 2013, p. 328). Each of these institutions plays an important role in the functioning of democratic system. Analyz
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