The new test for journalism

So at the end of the day journalism has not died in Turkey.

If it had died as some of our colleagues have been saying lately out of pessimism, there wouldn’t be any need felt to issue the publication ban to the news about the commission’s corruption investigation for the four former ministers.

The statement by Hakkı Köylü, the commission’s head from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) that “We were obliged at the end to do this,” is a reflection of the uneasiness about journalism at work.

I need to say it proudly that Hürriyet’s share in this uneasiness is big, too.

Hürriyet covered the news on the commission about the four former AKP ministers with the same interest it has done so the investigation commissions of ministers from (former ruling parties) ANAP or DYP. It used an objective language for the developments in the commission. Obviously, Hürriyet was not only the only media outlet that meticulously covered the developments in the commission.

Cumhuriyet, Taraf, Yurt and Birgün were among the newspapers that widely covered the news about the commission. Yet there were also newspapers that totally ignored the developments in the commission. If their mentality were to be valid for other journalists, the government would not have felt this ban. Yet it seems those media outlets blindness’ to the developments was not effective.

The newspapers in this category did not even feel the need to inform their readers in detail about the publication ban. On Nov. 27, the news about the publication was not even in newspapers like Star, Bugün or Takvim. Türkiye, Özgür Gündem, Sabah, Akşam, Yeni Şafak, Yeni Akit, Milliyet and Vatan hardly saw the news in their interior pages.

It...