We started our media capture discussions last episode asking whether what's happening to American media is a rupture or a reckoning. Bilge Yesil's answer, drawn from decades of studying Turkish media, is clarifying and a little unsettling: there was no dramatic breaking point in Turkey either. Just a continuous drift — commercialization, consolidation, political pressure layering on top of market pressure — normalized and incremental, until the transformation was complete and no one could point to the moment it happened.
Dr. Bilge Yesil is a Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island and affiliate faculty in Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State and, most recently, Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order — and she knows this terrain better than almost anyone.
In this conversation, we ask her to walk us through both sides of how capture actually works: the coercive moves — arrests, closures, the blunt instruments — and the quieter, more durable ones: advertising leverage, debt dependencies, ownership consolidation. (Sound familiar? We talk about the Demirören family. We talk about Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post.)
And then we ask the question we really wanted answered: for Americans watching declining ad revenues, shuttered newsrooms, and leaders who call journalists the enemy — what does Turkey's experience tell you about where to look? And what are you probably still not seeing?
