Turkey's English daily newspaper, Harriyet, reported last week that tensions were again rising over whether Turkey's press is free or not as a major international watchdog issued a stern warning while the prime minister accused the countriy's media of intentionally smearing the government.
The detention of journalists in Turkey is an "alarming threat to press freedom" and contradicts the country’s image as a democratic role model in the Middle East, the United States based human-rights organization Freedom House said in a press statement released. According to Freedom House, some 50 journalists are currently in prison.
Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking to his party group in Parliament, criticized journalists in his country and called on the international press to look closer at the events in Turkey.
Until the early 1980s, television in Turkey was limited to a single state-run channel, which was closely controlled by the authorities. The advent of satellite channels meant that the public-broadcasting monopoly was broken, since Turkey language programs could be beamed in from transmitters in Europe.
BBC News reminds us that Turkey's progress towards democracy and a market economy was halting in the decades following the death of President Ataturk in 1938. The army saw itself as the guarantor of the constitution,and ousted governments on a number of occasions when it thought they were challenging secular values.
Concern over the potential for conflict between a secular establishment backed by the military and a traditional society rooted in Islam resurfaced with the landslide election victory of the Islamist-based Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002.