Under the old regime, mainstream media appeared to have an informal guild with the bureaucracy, where the power concentrated, away from the elected governments. As the tiny fraction of the national media led by the pious Muslims vaguely critical of the settled order grew in the 1990s, the Office of the Chief of Staff introduced a new policy. The media outlets that did not fully cooperate with the military were formally excluded from the official functions through what would come to be known as a system of ‘accreditation’. In the wake of the regime change from 2011, with an increasingly pliant military in the new era, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) government would start exercising genuine power, arguably for the first time for a political party since the liberal- populist Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti) rule for a decade from 1950. In an ostensibly mimetic continuity, the AKP administration now using authentic power would re- initiate the practice of the earlier power holders, the bureaucracy, and implement a de facto policy of media accreditation, possibly with a vengeance: Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan (president from August 2014) would begin effectively to ignore the mainstream media and, in a blatant policy of discrimination, banish and leave out the majority of the national outlets from the official receptions. He would talk only to those journalists whose loyalty he did not doubt. What was an exception under the old regime, from 1997 in particular, attracting frequent criticisms in the circles during the period as an assault on media freedom, to be eventually terminated by the Office of the Chief of Staff in 2012, would thus virtually become the norm in the early phase following the old regime. The national media that did not associate with the new power holders, or somehow failed to convince to be in full allegiance, could not possibly have reporters in close physical proximity to Erdoğan, and on those rare occasions of impromptu meeting when those reporters would grab a chance encounter, they would risk sharp rebukes for alleged defiance and audacity.

This excommunication in practice hardly meant that the media thus shunned would be left entirely on their own. Highly suspected, yet unmistakable from the Gezi protests of 2013 described in the preceding chapter, Erdoğan closely controlled the reporting and the comments in the mainstream media, amazingly to the slightest detail.