Turkey’s last big independent media firm is snapped up by a regime ally

RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN has been on a roll lately. On March 18th the Turkish president announced the army’s capture of Afrin, a Kurdish stronghold in Syria, after two months of relentless attacks. Barely a week later, he scored another victory when a pliable mogul snapped up the last bastion of semi-independent journalism in Turkey, the Dogan group, for $1.2bn.

For one of the country’s largest media conglomerates, the sale must have felt like a coup de grâce. Dogan outlets, including two of the country’s four biggest newspapers, Hurriyet and Posta; a leading television channel, CNN Turk; and a news agency, among many others, have been squirming under government pressure for years. The group’s ageing owner, Aydin Dogan, one of the symbols of Turkey’s deposed secular order, has been hounded by tax inspectors and prosecutors. People close to his group say Mr Dogan conducted the sale without consulting any associates. Some believe the mogul faced arrest unless he sold his empire to one of the president’s men. Had that happened to the 81-year-old, he would have joined over a hundred other Turkish journalists already in prison, most of them jailed since the failed coup of 2016.

The move leaves Mr Erdogan and his allies in control of almost all big media outlets ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections due next year. According to Esra Arsan, an analyst, two out of every three newspapers in Turkey, representing a crushing 90% of total national circulation, are now in the hands of businessmen close to the government. Some are closer than others. The current CEO of one big media group is the brother of Mr Erdogan’s son-in-law (who happens to be energy minister). Others, including the Dogan group’s new owner, Erdogan Demiroren, have been pushed into the business by a government that wants all media to be run by people it can boss around. In a leaked phone conversation from 2013, Mr Demiroren got such an earful from Turkey’s president after one of his newspapers published details of secret peace talks with the leader of a Kurdish insurgent group that he suffered both an epiphany and a breakdown. “Why did I ever get into this business?” he was heard asking Mr Erdogan through his tears.

The Turkish strongman had been putting the screws on the Dogan group for much longer. In 2009, after Hurriyet aired corruption allegations against a religious charity close to Mr Erdogan’s government, the finance ministry slapped the group with an extortionate tax fine of $2.5bn (later reduced to about $600m). The move forced Mr Dogan to sell two newspapers, Milliyet and Vatan, to Mr Demiroren on the eve of a parliamentary election in 2011. Dogan outlets have since sacked journalists deemed too critical of the president and toned down their coverage. In the summer of 2013 the group’s flagship news channel stopped reporting from the scene of the biggest anti-government protests in years—to air a documentary about penguins. Amid the mass purges that followed the coup attempt, Dogan newspapers have toed the government line even more closely. Last spring Hurriyet censored an interview with Orhan Pamuk, in which the Nobel laureate for literature outlined why he opposed constitutional changes giving Mr Erdogan a range of substantial new powers as a consequence of transforming Turkey’s broadly parliamentary system of government into a presidential one. (The changes were narrowly approved by a referendum last year, though opponents say the ballot was invalid.)

Journalists at Dogan outlets, for whom the inevitable sale of the businesses still came as a shock, describe the mood in their newsrooms as funereal. Those known for their past outspokenness are expected to get the boot in the coming months. “Even if we behave and continue censoring ourselves, that’s not enough for them, because they know what’s going on in our hearts,” says one writer, referring to Mr Erdogan’s government. “It’s not what we write that matters anymore, but what we represent.”