Erdo?an casts shadow over fair elections in Turkey

The record may have been broken on May 1 when most of the national TV channels did very little other than broadcast live speeches from President Tayyip Erdo?an and Prime Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu. But there is no guarantee that it may not be broken again during the course of parliamentary elections on June 7.

Erdo?an delivered public speeches in two and Davuto?lu three places that Friday. The timing of the speeches were so perfect that one was starting as the other one was about to finish. 

The TV stations who are nicknamed ?the pool media,? a reference to the financial ?pool? formed by owners of construction companies that have won lucrative government tenders, were shifting from Davuto?lu to Erdo?an and vice versa.

The state-run TRT was doing that, too; after all one of them is the president and the other is the PM. The fact that very little if any place remains for the other parties ? which is actually in the TRT law ? is not something particularly observed these days.

But other news channels, the mainstream ones, have been doing the same for two main reasons. The first is only a justification of the second; one is the president, the other is the PM. The second reason is that they do not dare to ignore the speeches if they do not want to be subject to pressing telephone calls from their press offices or advisers, given fines by the TV regulatory body RTÜK because of otherwise ignorable details, or be subjected to financial pressure from inspectors.

And that doesn?t stop in the evening hours. The news bulletins are full of what the president and the PM said during the day. The fact that their words, most of the time, have almost no news value and that both are repeating the same lines over and over again doesn?t change...