Journalism Is Not a Crime!

Tomorrow, on June 10th, this country's honest pens—the journalists who pay a price for chasing the truth—will come side by side at 7:00 p.m. at Taksim Tünel Square and cry out with a single voice:

"Journalism Is Not a Crime!"

But my dear friend who rushes to work in the morning, who struggles to make a living, who looks to the future with anxiety: as a person on the street, why does this cry concern you? Why should the eyes and ears of the worker in the factory, the peasant in the field, the unappointed teacher, and the youth whose future has been stolen be on that square tomorrow?

Come, let us speak together about today's rotting system, what the media means to the rulers, and tomorrow's free world.

Who Is a Journalist and Why Do We Need Them?

The dominant capitalist system wants you to be merely consumers, debtors, and obedient workers. For this order to remain standing, it needs not only the police and the prisons; above all it needs ideological apparatuses that will control the minds of the masses. This is where the conglomerate-owned media comes in—the most powerful consent-manufacturing center of this system. From television screens and from headlines bought with money, you are told the fairy tale that everything is fine; your poverty is packaged as "fate," and your exploitation as a "success story."

This is where the true journalist comes in—the one who tears that packaging, who razes that fairy tale to the ground. The journalist is the one who does not regard knowledge as a "commodity" (a thing for sale), but turns it into a weapon for the people's liberation.

So why does the person on the street need a journalist so vitally?

• They Eliminate Class Blindness: The capitalist order constantly creates artificial enemies to make worker fight worker and the poor fight the poor. The journalist turns their cameras and their pen toward where attention should actually be directed. They expose into the coffers of which conglomerates the taxes stolen from your pocket flow as incentives, and who adds wealth upon wealth while the minimum-wage earner struggles to survive.
• They Are the Guardians of Our Commons: The journalist is the first barricade that prevents the plundering of our nature, our rivers, and our forests by mining and construction companies. Were it not for them writing, we would never have learned of the cry of the peasant in Akbelen, or of the greed of the multinational companies behind the mining disaster in İliç. The journalist defends our shared living spaces by keeping social memory alive.
• They Are the Voice of the Voiceless, the Visibility of the Unseen: Who defends, in courtrooms and on street barricades, the rights of a worker who was fired for being unionized in the factory, who lost their life in a workplace murder that was sought to be covered up? When the courts of the rulers fall silent, it is the journalist who opens the case file and presents it to the conscience of the public.

As Karl Marx said, "The press transforms the struggle of individuals within the state from an institutional struggle into an intellectual struggle." If the journalist is silenced, the people are left blind, deaf, and mute. For in the darkness, every kind of exploitation and every kind of lawlessness can be hidden more easily. The journalist is the torch of social healing and of a more just future.

Those Whose Pens Were Broken: Those Who Paid the Price of Truth with Their Lives

These lands were watered with the blood of brave journalists who defended the truth at the cost of their lives. So why were they targeted? Why did the powerful of the day, the counter-guerrilla structures, and the capital classes fear them so much? Let us remember, for remembering is the greatest revolutionary act:

• Abdi İpekçi: He was murdered by the fascist triggermen directed by the rulers because he defended social reconciliation, peace, and justice, and because he exposed the hitmen of dark forces and the mafia-politics-capital relationships.
• Uğur Mumcu: He revealed the umbilical cord connecting capital, the religious orders, and arms smugglers to imperialism. Decades in advance, he said that "the youth recruited into the religious orders and communities would tomorrow seize the key points of the state." The dominant forces, who did not want the truth to be learned by the working class and the people, placed a bomb in his car.
• Musa Anter (Apê Musa): He was a plane tree who wrote of the suffering, the language, the culture, and the injustices endured by the Kurdish people. Because he resisted the rulers' policy of turning the oppressed peoples against one another and geographically isolating the truth, he was murdered in the middle of the street in Diyarbakır in 1992 by the dark forces of the deep state (JİTEM).
• Metin Göktepe: He was a correspondent for Evrensel; the journalist of the street, of the factories, and of the working class. He wanted to witness firsthand the state's violence and oppression in custody. Solely and only "because he looked where no one was supposed to look, because he saw with the naked eye the truth the rulers were hiding, and because he dared to write it," he was beaten to death by the state's law enforcement forces.
• Ahmet Taner Kışlalı: He was an intellectual who defended enlightenment, secularism, and democracy against fascism. While writing in his column in the Cumhuriyet newspaper about how reactionary formations were laying siege to society, he, just like Mumcu, was torn from us by a bomb placed in his car.
• Hrant Dink: He was a messenger of peace who tried to bring together the suffering of these lands' ancient peoples, who showed how nationalism and chauvinism were used by the rulers as an apparatus of hatred to divide the working class. In this country where he lived "with the unease of a dove," he was shot in the back in broad daylight in the middle of the street, in a planned assassination, before the eyes of the state.

None of these names was chosen by chance. They were silenced because they aired the dirty laundry of chauvinism, of the order of exploitation, of the gangs, and of the state apparatus that protects them. Their silencing was, in fact, the cutting off of the voice of the working class and the oppressed peoples.

Today's Repression and Changing Methods: The "Sophisticated" Siege

At the point we have reached today, repression has changed its form, but its essence and its class character have remained the same. Now the rulers apply, not merely through physical assassinations but using the entire state apparatus and financial power, an organized and structural strategy of strangulation. Before us is a smart censorship mechanism that wants to destroy the truth entirely and leave society completely "without alternatives."

Today's methods of repression are seen in all their nakedness in the systematic attacks against the BirGün newspaper and its correspondents, and in the files of honest journalists such as Alican Uludağ and İsmail Arı.

Today's methods of repression rise upon the following pillars:

1. The Grip of the Judiciary and "Legal" Censorship

The open censorship of earlier eras has today been replaced by fabricated laws. Laws enacted under the names "combating disinformation" or "publicly disseminating misleading information to the public" have been turned into whips through entirely flexible and open-ended articles. Today, when a journalist writes about a corruption case, a minister's irregularity, or the real rate of inflation, they find themselves directly in court. Even if journalists are not thrown into prison, they are sought to be worn down, intimidated, and robbed of their time by being forced to spend their working hours in courthouse corridors—that is, through "judicial harassment" (SLAPP lawsuits).

2. Economic Embargo and Financial Terror

The partnership of the capital class and the government has subjugated the media through property relations. The few publications that insist on remaining independent, meanwhile, are left gasping for breath economically.

• Astronomical fines imposed through RTÜK,
• The Press Advertising Agency unjustly cutting off official advertisements,
• Companies that advertise in opposition channels and newspapers being threatened with tax audits...

The ruling class uses institutions like the Press Advertising Agency (BİK) and RTÜK as economic cudgels to muffle the voice of truth.

• Evrensel Newspaper: Evrensel—the newspaper of the worker, of the striking laborer, of the oppressed—was sought to be left gasping for breath economically when its official advertising rights were entirely revoked through the unlawful and systematic decisions of the Press Advertising Agency. As if that were not enough, it is being sought to be strangled with multimillion-lira compensation suits over a single critical report, and with countless investigations launched against its editors-in-chief and writers. The mindset that physically murdered Metin Göktepe today wants to destroy Evrensel economically.
• BirGün Newspaper: Every day it writes about the corruption of those who grew wealthy with the people's money, it faces a new access ban, a new advertisement-cutting penalty, and billion-lira compensation suits. BirGün workers such as Sarya Toprak are openly targeted by the pro-government media, and the repression extends even to journalists' families, turning into a social intimidation campaign.

3. Digital Siege and Algorithmic Censorship

Repression has now spilled over into the digital universe as well. Through the courts, access bans are imposed every day on thousands of news links, and entire websites are shut down. Genuine debates in the public sphere are stifled through the digital lynching campaigns of government-directed troll armies and through manipulated artificial intelligence algorithms. The raiding overnight of the home of a young person conducting interviews on the street, or of the digital broadcaster who publishes them, is nothing but an effort to cut off the street's echo in the digital realm.

4. De-identification and Precaritization

The Palace bureaucracy is seizing the press cards of all the workers of the opposition press, foremost among them Evrensel and BirGün. It renders them precarious in the squares, exposed to police violence, and liable to be taken into custody under the pretext that they "have no card."

And why is this entire enormous apparatus being mobilized? Because the capitalist system is in a deep crisis. As exploitation intensifies and poverty deepens, the legitimacy of those who govern is being shaken. They fear that the people's hunger, anger, and just demands will turn into an organized consciousness. They know very well that the bare nakedness of the truth has a revolutionary power capable of setting the masses in motion!

A United Front of Shared Action: Together to the Streets, Together to the Future!

Dear friends, comrades, honorable people who do not want to surrender their future to the darkness of capital and the powerful;

Against the rulers' strategy of governing us by dividing, fragmenting, and isolating us, the greatest, most indestructible weapon in our hands is collective solidarity and a united front of shared action. The ruling class wants to catch the worker alone in the factory, the student alone in the lecture hall, and the journalist alone in the courthouse corridors. For they know that the isolated person cowers and the lonely person submits. This is precisely why the June 10th gathering at Taksim is not merely the rights-seeking struggle of a single professional group; it is the will to lay claim to a future as a whole.

The freedom of journalists is directly connected to the miner's helmet, the shipyard worker's occupational safety, the autonomy of university youth, and women's right to life. To leave journalists alone is to surrender our own future to the mercy and darkness of the rulers.

This march is not merely a march to save today; it is a march to build, starting today, tomorrow's free, equal, and classless world. This is why amplifying the voice of the street is a historical necessity:

• Workers, Laborers: While the mainstream media ignores your strikes and your union struggles, stand by the journalists who breathe tear gas with you behind those barricades. Do not leave alone those who sacrifice their own voice so that your voice may be heard.
• Youth, Those Whose Future Has Been Stolen: You owe a debt to those cameras that announced to the world your arms, handcuffed in the struggle for an autonomous university and in the demonstrations for the right to housing. To defend your own future, grasp the hands that hold those cameras.
• Women, Defenders of Life: Stand in the ranks behind those honest pens that do not let the cases of our murdered sisters be forgotten, that carry to the cities the cry of the peasant women defending their nature against the mining companies.

The future is not a span of time that arrives on its own; the future is the design of a position won by fighting for it, starting today. If those who defend the truth fall to their knees, an entire society sinks into darkness.

A Call to Stand Side by Side in the Honorable March

To every citizen who seeks their rights on the street, who has had enough of the government's lies while calculating the cost of the bread they will bring home, who hungers for justice, I call out: This march is your march. This is the honorable march of those who cannot be subjugated, those whose pens are not for sale, and those who are not afraid to say "The Emperor is naked."

Tomorrow on that square we will not merely stand side by side; we will be one another's trench, one another's voice. To bring down the walls of fear, to shatter that dark illusion in which they want to imprison us—to the streets, to action, to unity!

Let us unite our voices: If journalists write to defend our rights, then we too will be on the streets for their freedom. Let us defend our truth: Let us set their pens free, so that our tomorrows too may be bright.

We will be at Taksim tomorrow to cry out with our loudest voice the demand: "Free the imprisoned journalists!" Let all the repression directed at press freedom come to an end. Freedom for the ETHA workers Pınar, Nadiye, Elif, and Müslüm!

Journalism is not a crime, and cannot be put on trial!

We call on all honorable people who lay claim to their future to gather tomorrow, Wednesday, June 10th, at 7:00 p.m. at Taksim Tünel Square, in the voice of justice and of the future!