Writing history's first rough draft

Moment to moment, Prime Ministry reporters track the prime minister, where he goes, what he says and does not say. An already exhausting job considering Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s hectic schedule, their job is made more difficult by tight-lipped officials and stiff security officers always encircling the first man of the executive.

“A one-party government means information is controlled by one source. They try not to give information and we do our best to get it,” Hasan Tüfekçi, a senior prime ministry reporter from daily Hürriyet, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.

“During the coalition period, it was possible to obtain a party’s hidden information by contacting one of the other parties,” Tüfekçi said, referring to the government led by the deceased leader of Democratic Left Party, or DSP, Bülent Ecevit, with the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, and the Motherland Party, or ANAP.

Some reporters agree the attitude of the government has worsened in the last couple of years.
“It is like a black box. We have to contend with the few sentences they let out. Bureaucrats used to share information,” Murat Pazarbaşı, reporter at daily Milliyet said.

“It is impossible to get inside information from cabinet meetings now,” Tüfekçi said.

Even asking the prime minister questions has become a luxury, reporters said. “They demand our questions beforehand, sometimes it is a guard who asks us, sometimes it is a press officer. My questions should be left to my own discretion. The prime minister is free to answer them or not,” Fatma Çözen of Star TV said. “This is not compatible with democracy. There is an air of secrecy at the moment. They ask us about even the smallest amount of information we have received,” said Çözen.

“They give the information they want to and the rest is out of the question,” said İlker Karagöz, a reporter at Fox TV.

Reaching the man�
One of the most exhausting tasks faced by a Prime Ministry reporter is to deal with the Prime Minister’s guards, whose job, basically, is to keep people away from him. “For the last two years, on the grounds of security, our ability to work closely with the Prime Minister has been restricted,” Tüfekçi said.

“Guards tell us we should stay away from him, which is not the case when we try to speak to other ministers. We can move freely when other ministers speak. But in the Prime Minister’s program’ we are confined to a predetermined area, from the time the Prime Minister leaves his house, then finishes his speech and then leaves the area,” Pazarbaşı said.

“I think there is a feeling that journalists pose a danger,” Karagöz said.

The possibility of earning the trust of the guards is negated by the practice of regularly changing security guards. “There may be as many as three changes in three months. It is important that we know security personnel, more so than the prime minister, so we can get the news,” Karagöz added.

No consideration
“You try to have a good view of the prime minister, but most of the guards protect him without giving any consideration to the press,” Star TV cameraman Emrah Ozan said.

“There is no comparison with the Ecevit period. He was much closer to journalists and nurtured relations with them,” Tüfekçi said about the ex-prime minister, who was a journalist in his youth.

These restrictions occur in addition to the constant travelling around Turkey, as literally everywhere the prime minister goes, the reporters follow. “The Prime Minister travels outside Ankara almost every weekend. Ecevit’s election rallies numbered 10 or 12 in 2002, whereas Erdoğan has organized 60,” Tüfekçi said.

Following him involves wild chases on highways across Turkey, with the prime minister’s convoy always taking the left lane. “As we are not included in the prime minister’s convoy, we reach dangerous speeds when following him by car,” Karagöz said.

Even relatively calm days spent at the Prime Ministry’s press office are not without problems. “Physical conditions are limited. The press room at the Prime Ministry should be bigger and better equipped. This is sometimes the only place foreign journalists see when they arrive in Turkey. It is not bad, but it could be better,” said Serhat Akça, a reporter at CNNTurk.

Prime Ministry reporters never think of their life as mundane, but things went out of control when they went to cover the Prime Minister’s recent visit to Turkey’s southeastern province of Hakkari, where terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, sympathizers and pro-Democratic Society Party, or DTP, protestors threatened their lives.

“We followed the Prime Minister to the Yüksekova district of Hakkari, and then proceeded to the city center by car. Supporters of the terrorist organization, mostly adolescents and teenagers, were waiting for us at the only entrance to the city. They started to throw stones at us. Their numbers quickly swelled into the hundreds. There were no policemen around,” Karagöz said.

"The terror organization had issued a declaration the previous day, stating that anyone who did not close their shop or turn off their car was an enemy. They ruined our car, only the gendarmeries’ intervention saved us,” he said.

“The press was warned there were large numbers of teenagers, some of them carrying long-range rifles, at the city’s entrance. We should have been included in the Prime Minister’s convoy. Some of us could have died,” Ozan said. "When Bülent Ecevit was prime minister, the press was always under the security shield of the prime minister,” said Karagöz.