Reporters Without Borders — Except Turkish, That is

Yesterday, a turkish court issued an arrest warrant against Erol Önderoglu. He belongs to the organization Reporters without Borders, a non-profit organization that promotes freedom of information and freedom of the press. The court based its decision on several counterterrorism acts, since Önderoglu worked for a pro-kurdish newspaper. He often criticised the turkish regime, which was rated as propaganda for the forbidden kurdish labor party PKK.

Should a government be able to arrest reporters? After all, all they did was trying to tell the truth. Sure, every truth has at least two sides, but I am pretty sure that Önderoglu didn’t do anything that can be labeled an act of terrorism. A reporter’s job should be to investigate and tell an unbiased story. If a government controls what the reporter is about to publish, his publication is no longer unbiased. That is why, in my opinion, the freedom of the press and control by the government cannot coexist.

Of course, this is not only the case for Turkey, there are many other countries in the world where the press is not completely free. Check out https://rsf.org/en/ranking for a graphic that shows the degree of press freedom. The image shows that especially (north-)western Europe has a high degree of freedom, while Turkey is colored bright red.

I’m not here to judge whether what Önderoglu wrote was propaganda or not, but I think a country with a government that arrests reporters who do not report in their favor are behind (north)west-Europe at least a couple of decades.

Where does all that leave us? Don’t believe everything reporters tell you. Especially in countries with a low press freedom degree, what you read is most likely not what you get, but what the government gets.