When two young journalists were married in a Turkish prison in 2017, they vowed to be always together “in bondage and in freedom, in autocracy and in democracy.”
Minez Bayülgen, a journalist with the news website Diken at the time, had only a few minutes to marry her colleague Tunca Öğreten during a half-an-hour prison visit. Öğreten, who was also a journalist at Diken then, was in jail for reporting on the leaked emails of Berat Albayrak, a former minister and President Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law.
A few months after this unusual wedding, another journalist couple — Kadri Gürsel, who was a former columnist for the Milliyet newspaper and a former Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporter, and his wife and colleague, Nazire Kalkan Gürsel — passionately kissed each other in front of the same prison in Istanbul’s Silivri district. Gürsel was released after a nearly year-long arrest during the trial of Cumhuriyet journalists for “aiding a terrorist organization without being its member.”
I was in front of the Silivri prison, along with dozens of journalists and press freedom advocates, on that September night when the Gürsels were reunited. AFP photographer Yasin Akgul captured the moment, entitling his iconic shot “the Kiss of Freedom.”
In 2017, Turkey was the world’s worst offender when it came to jailing reporters for their work. After a brief period of improvement, this year the government launched a fresh wave of mass arrests targeting reporters and criminalizing journalism with new laws ahead of the elections in which Erdoğan is seeking another term. In addition to the ongoing criminalization of journalism, Turkish journalists face physical and online attacks, hefty administrative fines for critical reporting, strategic private and government lawsuits, insufficient financial and technological resources, low public trust, and the algorithmic bias of digital platforms that boost pro-government media outlets. These challenges generate a powerful chilling effect, spreading self-censorship and creating the false perception that independent journalism in Turkey is no longer possible.
But Turkish journalism is giving itself its own kiss of freedom. Many independent journalists are stubbornly persisting with a mission to sustain quality journalism in Turkey despite all the political, social, and technological challenges. Although the mainstream media is almost totally controlled by Erdoğan and his allies, a new breed of independent reporting flourishes in various digital mediums and formats, from newsletters to video to podcasts. There are dozens of examples, but here are four in the vanguard of next-generation Turkish journalism.
