Cumhuriyet editor-in-chief Can Dündar receiving the 2015 Reporters Without Borders Prize.Wikicommons/Claude Truong-Ngoc. Some rights reserved. The Turkish constitutional referendum brought to the surface the good, the bad and the ugly regarding the role of the media before, during and after the whole process. The legitimacy of the referendum results was questioned by international monitoring bodies, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council for Europe, for the opposition’s lack of equal access to public broadcasting and other violations and intimidation tactics that infringed upon the opposition party and citizens’ rights to campaign freely.
On the one hand, tactics such as discrediting by association surfaced as the No Platform campaigners were depicted as terrorists and their patriotism was questioned by Prime Minister Yıldırım just because they expressed opposition to the regime change from a parliamentarian democracy to a presidential one. Some of the other violations included the use of police and security forces to suppress the opposition via harassment and detentions in order to prevent the No campaigners from distributing leaflets or giving speeches on the streets and in public transportation. The police selectively imposed the state of emergency conditions brought about after a failed coup attempt last July while exercising its loyalty to the Yes campaign.
For their part, mainstream pro-government newspapers functioned almost like PR agencies for the Yes campaign. For instance, Sabah enthusiastically supported the “for a strong Turkey, I am ‘in’” campaign that was started by a famous footballer on social media and featured a column written by Erdoğan on why the citizens of Turkey should vote in favor of the constitutional amendments just days before the referendum. Similarly, Hurriyet censored parts of its interview with Turkish Nobel Laurate Orhan Pamuk, where he explained why he would vote against the proposed constitutional change. It certainly wasn’t surprising that in such a campaign climate where all the state resources were deployed and utilized heavily for the Yes campaign even some imams appointed by the state controlled Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) encouraged their congregation to vote for the constitutional change during their Friday sermons while adopting President Erdoğan’s discourse of labelling those who reject the proposed changes as traitors.
