Bans, jails and shameless lies
On one hand, the story of press freedom in Turkey is extremely brief: it just doesn’t exist. But on the other, it reveals a complex knot of undemocratic laws, feeble journalistic traditions and huge economic and political interests that are hard to disentangle. ‘Bans, jails and shameless lies’ is the first book to reveal the mechanisms behind the system, illustrated with examples to render the Turkish media landscape as intelligible as possible. Interviews with, among others, Cumhuriyet’s Can Dündar, veteran correspondent Amberin Zaman and Today’s Zaman’s Bülent Kenes.
Published in May 2016 at Eva Tas Foundation in the Netherlands, the book was distributed in cooperation with International PEN. Since the book is not widely available, the publisher and I decided to put the full PDF online.