Teoman Kadioglu, a columnist with the Posta newspaper for 15 years, has been fired over a tweet he posted about decreasing sales of a sister publication.
“Hurriyet newspaper has a actual daily circulation of
28,000 in Istanbul. It is 60,000 in Turkey as a whole. Are social media and digital
revolution the only reason for hitting this low?” Kadioglu tweeted on Monday.
The circulation report published every week by the online
media outlet Medya Radar puts Hurriyet’s circulation at around 260,000.
However, government critics say this figure is often misleading as the newspaper
is believed to have lost considerable portion of its readers after it was sold
to a pro-government businessman.
“After I tweeted this, they terminated my contact with
Posta where I wrote a health column for 15 years. I am pretty upset,” he
further tweeted the same day.
Turkey
has held the notorious title the leading jailer of journalists in the
world for quite some time now. More than 300 journalists have ended up
in pre-trial detention as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s dragnet
against his critics, while thousands of others were left unemployed after their
newspapers and TVs were shuttered. The monopolization of the Turkish media,
however, had been in the making long before the recent crackdown.
Hurriyet, the once-best selling paper in the country, was bought
by the pro-government businessman Yildirim Demiroren in March 2018.