The Turkish government continued to muzzle the press in 2021 in a variety of ways, including imprisoning journalists and using regulatory authorities to exert financial pressure.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Turkey, once the world’s worst jailer of journalists, is now ranked sixth in CPJ’s 2021 prison census after releasing 20 jailed journalists in the last year, but this doesn’t mean media freedom has improved in the country.
Journalism is still associated with terrorism in Turkey, and journalistic work is used as evidence against journalists in the overwhelming majority of convictions. In most of the trials, the evidence is typically made up of social media posts, news stories, articles or TV broadcasts.
Turkey has dropped precipitously since it was ranked 100th among 139 countries when Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its first worldwide index in 2002, the year the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power. The country was ranked 153rd out of 180 countries in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index.
According to a report by the Center for American Progress (CAP), despite heavy censorship, two key trends undercut President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s efforts to control the media landscape: “rising distrust toward the media and increasing fragmentation in the ways that Turks get their news.”
Cognizant of these trends, the Turkish government continued to increase its control over social media through restrictive laws. According to Freedom House’s yearly report on global Internet freedom, Internet freedom continued to decline for a third year in a row in Turkey. Hundreds of websites were blocked, online content deemed critical of President Erdoğan or his ruling AKP was removed from websites and social media platforms, while online activists, journalists and social media users were harassed both physically and online for their social media posts.
Here is some of the most important news from 2021 in the field of press freedom:
Press Freedom in Turkey: 2021 in Review – Stockholm Center for Freedom (stockholmcf.org)