First, Hürriyet Editor-in-Chief Ahmet Hakan “Defending the government is too serious a job to be left to journalists.” and wrote that AK Party MPs should appear on the screens.
Two days later, CNN Türk programmer and Hurriyet columnist Hande Firat also spoke, “Unfortunately, we have all crossed the line, whether it is the opposition or media outlets close to the ruling party.” saying, "I'm not going to play the ball.
Euphrates, “In the US and Europe, a journalist cannot go on the screen and speak like a spokesperson for a party. He comments but keeps his distance. In Turkey, this boundary is almost completely erased. Journalists speak like political actors. This harms both journalism and politics.” said he made a self-criticism for his program with journalists who have been defending the AK Party on behalf of the AK Party for years.
The first reaction came from Zafer Şahin, who has been defending the AK Party against opposition politicians on the same screen for years.
“After the articles and comments that appeared today, I did not appear on the evening program by my own will. I cannot remain unresponsive to an approach that allows the trolls of Fetön, the municipal media, to target us and prepare the ground for them to make fun of us. Life is a stance. “ "Hande Firat is not a journalist," he said, reacting to Hande Firat and announcing that he would no longer participate in broadcasts on CNN Türk.
If I thought what Ahmet Hakan and Hande Fırat did was a sincere professional self-criticism, I should have thanked them both.
However, one would have to have spent the last 20 years in a vegetative state not to realize that these successive outbursts were made with a signal from the Communications Directorate or directly from Beştepe.
As a matter of fact, after the recent Mehmet Akif Ersoy incident, the extent of the network of relationships in which journalists speaking on behalf of the AK Party have been involved has become clearer.
Moreover, in the IBB indictment, information that there were ‘pro-AK Party journalists’ directly associated with Murat Ongun was leaked during the investigation, but those names were not included in the indictment.
All this shows that the Palace and the AK Party are very uncomfortable with a mass of people who have become fools of fame and fortune with the power they have acquired through them.
But the problem goes far beyond the issue of who will defend the AK Party on the screens. In fact, the problem is the depoliticization and depoliticization of the political arena, which I have mentioned before.
The September 12 regime, which was established by putting the people, the main subject of politics, in the stands, created a space for professional politicians in the 80s and 90s. Within this created space, politicians continued to play ’politics’ until 2017.
In fact, although the will was not largely in the hands of the political establishment, politics had a significant weight in terms of public awareness and media representation.
It was no coincidence that in the early years of the AK Party's rule, there were many politicians other than Erdoğan who had high media and social resonance.
In the new regime called the ’Presidential Government System‘ established after the constitutional amendment in 2017, the political institution was also put on the tribune.
During this period, a so-called ‘state mind’ began to take decisions on behalf of the country. The ‘state mind’ was largely embodied in the person of ‘Devlet Bahçeli’.
In this period, there was no longer a need for high-profile political figures. In fact, the search for a ’low-profile prime minister‘ to replace Ahmet Davutoğlu after 2015 had begun.
Indeed, the newly established system was based on ‘low-profile’ politics and on running the country through a few actors from the top.
It is a natural consequence of this that even the ‘Terror Free Turkey’ process, which is one of the most important processes Turkey faces, is being carried out by positioning politics almost exclusively as an ‘observer’.
The current debate on who will defend the AK Party in the media should be evaluated within this general picture.
In the AK Party, which has been transformed into Turkey's largest signpost party, defending party policies by re-emphasizing intra-party figures may not yield the desired results not only strategically but also in terms of content.
In a political system where the people are not the main subjects of politics, the issue of who will defend the parties will not go beyond being a media and political tabloid.