Cihan Haber Ajansı

» see cihan.com.tr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On the night of 30 March 2014 the Istanbul mayoral race was being counted and the two big Turkish agencies were running different numbers. Anadolu Ajansı had Kadir Topbaş of the AK Party ahead. Cihan had Mustafa Sarıgül of the CHP ahead. Whichever channel you happened to be watching decided which of those two things you believed for most of the evening, and the final tally confirmed the state agency. That night is the best illustration of what Cihan was in this country, which was a second set of numbers.

The agency was founded on 1 January 1994 in Istanbul as part of Feza Gazetecilik, the company that also published the Zaman newspaper and the weekly Aksiyon. Feza was the media arm of the Gülen movement, and Cihan was never separable from that, which is both how it got the resources to build a national newsroom and how it ended.

What it built with those resources was real. By its own account, reported in a 2010 TESEV study of Turkish media regulation, Cihan was putting out around 450 written stories and 85 video reports a day. It ran an Arabic service from 1997. By its own count it kept bureaus in 31 countries and correspondents in 55, and it fed footage to foreign broadcasters including CNN International and the BBC. From 2003 it ran Cihan TV Network, which produced morning and evening bulletins for local channels that could not afford their own, starting with 28 of them and growing past 90.

The slogan was Biz oradayız. We are there. For an agency competing with a state wire service, the pitch was presence in places the state wire did not prioritize.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the trustees ~

The end came in two steps, several months apart. On 7 March 2016, acting on a request from the Istanbul chief prosecutor's office, the Istanbul 1st Criminal Judgeship of Peace appointed three trustees to run Cihan Haber Ajansı. Zaman had been taken the same way days earlier. A trustee appointment leaves the masthead where it is, which is precisely its usefulness. Most of the staff leave instead, and the output turns around inside a week.

So Cihan spent its last four and a half months as an agency under court appointed management, which is a period almost nobody counts when they date its death, and which explains why the agency that mattered on election nights had no visible role in the summer of 2016.

~ the decree ~

After the coup attempt of 15 July 2016 the government declared a state of emergency and began governing by decree. Decree KHK/668 was published in the Official Gazette on 27 July 2016, issue 29783, second repeat edition. Its second article closes, in one sentence each, the entities named on the attached lists: private radio and television companies on list two, print titles and their publishers on list three. The stated ground is affiliation with the organization the government designates as FETÖ/PDY.

Forty five newspapers went that day. Sixteen television channels and twenty three radio stations went with them, along with the magazines and the publishing houses. Three news agencies were on the list, and Cihan was much the largest, alongside Muhabir and SEM. There was no notice period and no process at the level of the individual organization.

The Constitutional Court later annulled parts of that decree, and some outlets caught by it were taken off the lists by subsequent decrees and allowed to reopen. None of that brought Cihan back.

~ what it means for the rest of us ~

I have no stake in defending Feza Gazetecilik and this grave is not an argument about the Gülen movement. The part worth keeping is narrower and it is about infrastructure. For twenty two years Turkey had two national wire services counting the same ballots, and on at least one famous night they produced different pictures of the same country, which forced everyone watching to notice that a vote count is a thing somebody assembles rather than a thing that simply exists.

Since 27 July 2016 there has been one. cihan.com.tr does not resolve to anything today. Nothing was posted in farewell and nothing was archived, which is the usual ending for a Turkish site that was closed rather than abandoned.

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