New Clubs

In place of their usual juicy tidbits about the doings of high society, Turkish gossip columns printed a curt and sober announcement last week: "Because of an agreement with the Turkish Newspaper Owners' Syndicate, we are discontinuing our society columns." Though the ban was made to seem a do-it-yourself affair, it was actually inspired by none other than Premier Adnan Menderes himself. The columnists, it seemed, had been giving too much gaudy publicity to The marriage of a former Miss Turkey to the mayor of Izmir, who also happens to be a cousin of the Premier's wife. Among other morsels, the columns reported that the Izmir city council had "volunteered" to pay a year's rent on a seaside apartment for the happy couple.

Such items, in a country where editors can be jailed for criticizing the government or its members, offer one of the few opportunities left to Turkey's editors to get in some sly jabs at Menderes and his governing Democrats. But Adnan Menderes seems to feel that even a little is too much, and that he can never have too many clubs to beat the press with. Last November he invoked the well-worn dictator's device of taking over control of all newsprint. Newspapers were forbidden to import any newsprint of their own, thus leaving them at the mercy of the government, which runs Turkey's paper mills. The independent Cumhuriyet of Istanbul is kept down to two or three days' supply of newsprint, thus keeping the editor under a dangling Damocles' sword. The opposition Ulus has been cut to one-fifth its normal supply, forcing a reduction in its circulation from 100,000 to 20,000. "They'd cut me off entirely," says Publisher Kasim Gulek, "but it would be difficult to explain why they want to ruin the newspaper founded by Ataturk."

A more novel Menderes gimmick is an agency to control all newspaper and magazine advertising. Advertisers must place their ads with the agency, and Minister of State Emin Kalafat allocates them to whatever publication he chooses. So far, the agency has not worked too well: some advertisers are insisting on having their ads placed in the publications of their own choice. But if Turkey's publishers had any doubts about the power of the government's new club, they had only to consider the case of 33-year-old Metin Toker. Last year Toker spent seven months in jail for having criticized a government official in his weekly TIME-styled newsmagazine Akis. When the new advertising agency went into effect, his quota of ads was-no ads at all.

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