Earlier this week, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a report on what it dubbed Turkey’s press freedom crisis. I have written about the AKP’s targeting of journalists and worrisome record on free speech before, so the CPJ report was welcome news as far as I am concerned, but I think that it will be ignored by the Turkish government for a variety of reasons. I wrote about some of them for the Atlantic yesterday:

The October 22 report on Turkey issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP) is getting lots of attention, and rightly so. Amid the growing clamor over Turkey’s media crackdown, the CPJ slammed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government for jailing (by its count) 76 journalists, 61 of whom are in prison as a direct result of their writing or reporting, mainly on Kurdish issues. The CPJ stated what many seasoned Turkey observers have known for awhile, which is that Erdoğan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have used overly expansive terrorism laws to staunch criticism of the government and intimidate the press into self-censorship.

The CPJ report is a welcome development, but it unfortunately comes too late. Not only is the harsh spotlight that the CPJ trained on Turkey unlikely to ameliorate the problem, it is in fact more likely that the government’s response will be to retrench rather than to let up in its assault on journalists and free speech. The political environment is such that Erdoğan feels that he has more to lose now by admitting that his government has taken an undemocratic turn when it comes to restrictions on free speech, although this would not have always been the case had organizations like the CPJ been paying closer attention in the not too distant past.

Five short years ago, the AKP was a lot more vulnerable to this type of critique. Turkey was coming off a series of wide-ranging political and social reforms that had been passed as part of the European Union accession process, and the AKP had in fact been initially elected by running on a stridently pro-EU platform. The Erdoğan government was reluctant to do anything that would endanger this process, and condemnation from Western governments and NGOs was taken seriously. Furthermore, the AKP was in the midst of a reelection campaign and, like any other political party in a democracy, more attuned to criticism.

The rest of the article can be found on The Atlantic’s website, so please head over there to read it.

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