Taraf

Earlier this year a new newspaper was started in Istanbul called Taraf, a liberal daily that has been and continues to be at the forefront of some very tumultuous political happenings here in Turkey. "Taraf" literally means "side" as in "taking sides". The Turkish Daily News ran a front-page feature about them earlier this week, complete with a clever Samuel Beckett allusion. Basically a bunch of people from a Marxist Turkish daily, Evrensel, and a left-leaning news magazine, Nokta, left to create this newspaper, and have been courageously pushing the boundaries of journalistic freedom here for the last four months. For example, they published military documents revealing the potential failure of officials to prepare for an attack on the Dağlıca army base that resulted in the deaths of 13 soldiers and the kidnapping of an additional 8.

Taraf even has its own Facebook group (which for some reason I can't join, but how many daily papers can say that in the first place?) The group links to other youth and radical social change organizations, so even if you can't understand everything there, that's worth checking out as well. A news editor is quoted at the end of the feature as saying "A raid on our offices may be legally legitimate, but it doesn't mean we can't object to the fact that such things are happening in a democratic country." I find the fact that liberal media outlets in any coutnry are challenging not just restrictions on the freedom of speech but the legality of the regulations themselves to be encouraging. Even more so in Turkey, where the lack of public discourse about such issues can at times be maddening.