Cumhuriyet asks: if we go silent, who will speak out?

March 5, 2009 On Sunday the front page of Cumhuriyet was left almost entirely blank in order to protest growing government interference in the free press in Turkey. As I wrote in my posting yesterday as well as in an earlier posting, the largest media group in Turkey, the Dogan Group--which is considered unfriendly to the AK Party government in Turkey--has recently been targeted by the Turkish Ministry of Finance for an investigation looking into non-payment back taxes. This comes on the heels of the suspicious takeover of the second-largest media group, ATV-Sabah, by a group headed by the son-in-law of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in November of 2007. Cumhuriyet has traditionally been very critical of the Dogan Group and its owner, Aydin Dogan, so I find their championing of Dogan's cause noteworthy.   At the bottom to the right, it reads (in Turkish): "If we go silent, who will speak?"