Transformation of press in Turkey: Neoliberal order

During the 1980s public service broadcasting particularly and the media landscape, in general, have undergone fundamental changes in Western Europe. Developments of media and communication technologies as well as ideological preferences were behind such transformation. The neoliberalism of the Reagan administration in the United States and consequent Conservative Party governments of Thatcher in the United Kingdom radically transformed the whole economic structure by extending market rules, putting emphasis on the service sector at the expense of industrial production, and deregulating the labor market. Similar changes took place in Turkey under the governments of Turgut Özal. Deregulation of public service broadcasting and the emergence of private radio and television channels may be seen as the most significant changes in the short term but in the long run, the whole media landscape has transformed including the press in Turkey. As far as the Turkish press is concerned, the most significant was the transformation of the way in which journalists carry out their function. What this study calls "the culture of neoliberal reporting", also implies a radical shift from the press industry into a much more complex structure of "media industry". To put it more openly, media organizations reorganized according to the neoliberal business model and the journalists became neoliberal individuals and employees. This study investigates such neoliberal shift in the Turkish press, by mainly interviewing journalists who actively worked during the period between the 1980s and 1990s. Three-level of analysis applied: First, the organizational level examined the transformation of media organizations based on neoliberal norms; the second, the individual transformation of journalistic culture, and finally its impact on the way in which journalists report their stories. With the interviews conducted, the data collected concerning patterns unraveled in the first section of this paper, discussing the neoliberal ideology and its relevance to the Turkish press. The conceptual framework of this paper is based on P. Dardot and C. Laval's theories on neoliberalism and R. Sennet's sociological analyses. Alongside this, neoliberalism's production system "flexible production"s roots were also researched. These three-way approaches composed an authentic conceptual framework. State intervention in economics has been criticized by several liberal authors ever since the end of the 19th century. After the Great Depression in 1929, the widespread popularity of Keynesian economics concerned liberal scholars that nations would succumb to socialism. Since the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, economists like Von Mises, Hayek, and Rougier have directed their criticism towards "laissez-faire" liberalism. According to Lippmann, classical liberalism claims that the liberal system is based upon divine rule has lost its intellectual supremacy by getting caught on the conformism prompted by this belief. Rougier talked about a "constructive liberalism" that did not completely prohibit state intervention in economic activities. German ordoliberals economists such as Rustow, Muller Armack, and Ropke talked about the necessity of regulative liberalism. So the suggestion of "constructive liberalism" was carried further by the ordoliberals and put into the focus of neoliberalism as the concept of "sociopolitics" (Gesellschaftspolitik). It suggested that societies could live in prosperity when society was organized according to constructive liberalism, which was shaped by consumers' preferences and increased competition and productivity in the market. As a result of these discussions, the neoliberal ideology was born that charged states with the duty of liberal interference, organized the society around competition, and forced individuals to adapt to this system through the lack of reassurance created. The policies implemented in line with this ideology resulted in a huge financialization wave around the world, and the weakening of labor organizations led to a significant decline in the labor share from the added value. Media, which was also considered one of the most influential tools to spread the neoliberal ideology, was among the first industries in the world to adopt neoliberal norms. The press industry underwent a huge transformation when computers began to be integrated into production processes during the 1980s. States deregulated television and radio broadcasting by privatizing public channels or abolishing broadcasting monopolies. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the formation of new markets. During the 1980s and 1990s, very significant mergers and buys took place in the media sector. Media giants like Maxwell and Murdoch bought newspapers, magazines, and TV channels around the world. This phenomenon led to the emergence of today's global media monopolies such as Walt Disney, News Corp., Time Warner, CBS, Bertelsmann, and Vivendi. These monopolies took interest in the Turkish market during the 1990s and undertook enterprises with local partners or on their own. Despite the interest of international groups, media in Turkey was always shaped by local groups, occasionally supported by the government. Dinc Bilgin Group started the Sabah newspaper in 1984 and the Aydın Dogan Group that bought Milliyet newspaper in 1979 were influential actors in Turkish media's neoliberal transformation. Uzan Group which started the first private TV broadcasting in 1990, abolishing the state's TV monopoly also had an important role. Through the in-depth interviews, this research examined the transformation of Turkish media organizations, journalists, and reporting under the influence of neoliberalism. During the 1990s, the administration of media organizations was passed to business managers from journalists, which played an important part in the growth of companies, going public, international business partners, and increase in debt opportunities, and similar financialization inclinations. Media companies displayed a tendency to venture into non-media-related fields as a result of their desire for fast financial growth. Thus, deregulations and privatizations in sectors such as energy and banking led to a change in the relations between the media and the government, leading to a media structure in which economic profits and stock values are the new priority. This structure devalued journalism and reporting over time, as profit-based activities like advertisements and promotions were prioritized. In this newly created environment, a group of journalists has become a privileged class with special relations to the government. The emerging "neoliberal journalism context" and welfare society's "mass media" concept were conflicted. Even though authors like Herman and Chomsky criticized welfare society, it is based on the idea of a "democratic pluralism", even though its limits are predetermined. On the other hand, the neoliberal governing frame depends on limiting democratic demands, as the Trilateral Commission Report puts it. This is necessary to minimize the state and for the market norm to pervade. Our research has demonstrated that the neoliberal transformation in the media was completed in Turkey before the 2001 economic crisis. Mainstream media companies organized according to the neoliberal business model, now spared fewer resources and expenses for reporting purposes, because the main goal of these companies became increasing their stock value and improving their balance sheets instead of news reporting. Consequently, the media reduced journalism and reporting from being their main product to a mere component in a company directed by business managers. Journalists have been injured with these changes in the administration, but they didn't manage to unite in order to stop or at least halt this transformation. As a result, a large number of journalists had to quit their professions and a new generation of neoliberal journalists emerged.