How free media is silenced

On March 1, 2009, a new "media boss" named Turgay Ciner and a newspaper called Habertürk were introduced to the Turkish media sector. In less than a month, the newspaper appeared with its most striking headline, "The confessions of an f-type non-commissioned officer." According to the report, on March 4, 2009, non-commissioned officers Ali Balta, Orhan Güleç and İsmail Dağ were caught red-handed and taken into custody while they were hacking into the Military Information Systems to upload fabricated Word documents that implicated Major General Rıdvan Güler in a crime.

The detained officers denied the accusation at first. It must have been because they were caught red-handed, that they admitted on the third day of detention that they openly falsified a private document issued by Güler on Dec. 31, 2008. Balta, the non-commissioned officer who admitted guilt, confessed everything that had happened until that time, starting with the days he resided in houses belonging to Gülen Movement members in Denizli. He said a movement member named Yusuf came to his home on Feb. 28, 2009 and gave a flash drive to him. Yusuf asked him to log into the Document Management System using a Word document in the flash drive and receive a buffer number and then send the document to any address registered in the system. In short, Balta plainly described how the crime was committed, as well as by whom and for what purpose the document was falsified.

In the following days, thanks to the Gülenist structure in the judiciary, the officers were set free while those who detained and questioned them were imprisoned on the grounds that they made the officers confess using "hypnotic torture." During the legal process, which introduced an absurd term like "hypnotic torture" to judicial history, these three officers were made to flee abroad in a mysterious way.

Habertürk's report was based on these confessions. The same day, the Gülen Movement's primary newspaper, Zaman, published a text criticizing the report on its website. The last sentence of the text was as follows: "The fact that the Habertürk newspaper, which has newly entered the media sector, has already begun inciting such operational attempts is reminiscent of the claims of coup-maker generals who, according to [Mustafa] Balbay's journals, say, 'Sir, Ciner is siding with us. We have broken the siege.' "

Thus, Habertürk's boss, Ciner, was threatened with the involvement of his name in the Ergenekon trials, which were carried out by a nasty combination of Gülenist police officers, prosecutors and judges. Thereafter Habertürk removed the headline from its website and published a text apologizing to the Gülen Movement for the headline the same day. What urged them to remove a true report from the website and made them apologize the same day was Zaman, which has recently stuck to the slogan: "Free media cannot be silenced."

When it became evident that Ciner was also illegally wiretapped by Gülenists during the Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 operations, Ciner challenged it with a written statement saying: "We have committed no illegal or immoral acts with which to be blackmailed, and we do not have a character that can be deterred by blackmailing."

The same evening, an audio recording was uploaded on YouTube revealing a conversation between Ciner and an anchorwoman with whom Ciner had an extramarital affair. The Ciner Media Group was forced into a Gülenist broadcasting policy and has made its broadcasting in this context for a long time. Furthermore, that anchorwoman started appearing on movement-affiliated Bugün TV four months later.

This article lists a small part of the criminal past of the Gülenist structure, which silenced the media by blackmailing media bosses and imprisoning the greatest number of journalists in Turkish history between 2010 and 2013.