On October 18, Istanbul police detained Mehmet Yılmaz, Abdullah Ilık and Serdar Uluocak over alleged links to the Gülen movement, and a court ordered all three jailed. Daily Sabah headlined them members of “terrorist FETÖ”. Eight words, and every judgment in them is the state’s. “FETÖ” is the Turkish government’s acronym for the Gülen movement: Fetullahçı Terör Örgütü, the Fethullahist Terror Organization. Daily Sabah puts “terrorist” in front of a name that already ends in terror, and states “members” as settled. That is the verdict noun: a label that judges before the facts arrive. The headline credits no one. Its text cites unnamed “authorities” who “announced Sunday”. The tell is a government’s own name for its enemy, printed as the plain name. The page says less than its headline. Its second paragraph says Yılmaz was “wanted for” membership, and the evidence it gives is ByLock and his work as an editor and reporter at publications including Zaman. Turkish Minute’s reports on earlier raids list the usual evidence: payphone calls, student apartments, a job at a Gülen-linked company, a deposit in the closed Bank Asya, the app. In 2023 Europe’s human rights court found ByLock use alone was no crime. Daily Sabah’s text never says a court then jailed all three. Anadolu, NTV, Takvim, Türkgün, HaberGo and Yeni Alanya headline the same acronym. Said often enough, a name stops sounding like a charge and starts sounding like a description. Behind it is a count from the Justice Ministry: more than 126,000 people convicted since 2016, 11,085 still in prison, 58,000 under investigation. President Erdoğan has targeted the movement since the December 2013 corruption investigations, which he called a Gülenist conspiracy. In each headline that uses the name as fact, the government’s word is the only word in the story.
