Freedom, To Varying Extents
You can kind of measure freedom of the press when looking at the flagship publication versus a fairly less prominent competitor.
Hürriyet does have a picture or two of the IMF protests buried behind some Flash, but it’s a bit strange to lead off with guys in suits and “President Erodoğan asked Minister Ali Babacan, ‘What will happen tomorrow?’” rather than showing the festivities down in Taksim.
It’s funny to see CNN rail along about riot police, since the pictures I’m seeing are pretty consistent with the standard police presence for a normal demonstration in Taksim/Beyoğlu. The tear gas is certainly not normal (the only other time we’ve seen reports of that was May Day), but just as abnormal as people doing anything besides walking around with signs.
We can actually see this part of town from our window (we can see a lot of town from our window, but we get some detail looks at Taksim), and it really seems like this is pretty isolated. Nobody was even talking about it at work today.
They make it seem like a war zone. We’re talking about a street or two.