AT THE start of its offensive against Kurdish insurgents in Syria’s Afrin province last month, Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim, held a morning briefing with more than a dozen editors of the country’s leading news outlets. According to accounts of the meeting, the journalists were provided with guidelines on how to cover the unfolding war. Reporters were asked to “bear in mind Turkey’s national interests”, one participant recalled. News published in the foreign media was to be treated with caution as it was likely to give a platform to “terrorist propaganda”. Readers were to be reminded that the army would take the utmost care to avoid civilian casualties. The coverage was to highlight that Turkish troops would be fighting Islamic State (IS) gunmen in addition to Kurdish ones—though IS has no presence in Afrin.

With a handful of exceptions, Turkey’s media have followed the government’s recommendations to the letter. The main channels have competed to be first to report on the number of villages captured and the numbers of Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) killed by Turkish troops. (The government detests the YPG because of its support for Kurdish separatists inside Turkey.) News stories have tended to be no more than a blend of government talking points and army communiqués. When Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, threatened to give American troops embedded with the Kurds elsewhere in Syria “an Ottoman slap”, no fewer than 16 newspapers featured his words on their front pages the following day. Turkey’s army claims to have “neutralised” over 2,000 YPG fighters in Afrin without killing a single civilian. Not a single mainstream media outlet has questioned the figures.

Turkey is the world’s biggest jailer of journalists, with over 100 currently behind bars. Mr Erdogan seems determined to keep it that way. On February 16th a court sentenced six media workers, including a prominent novelist, to life in prison without parole on trumped-up charges of involvement in an abortive coup in 2016. The same day Turkey released Deniz Yucel, a correspondent for a German newspaper, from pre-trial detention. Widely considered a bargaining chip in Turkey’s fraught relations with Germany, Mr Yucel had been locked up for over a year without even an indictment.

Arrest is the weapon of last resort. What gets Turkey’s government the coverage it wants is a more nuanced system of incentives and sanctions. Because the biggest news outlets are run by conglomerates with interests in sectors like mining, construction and shipping, even those media bosses privately opposed to the government dance to Mr Erdogan’s tune to avoid losing out on lucrative state contracts. Some hire government cronies. Critical pundits are banished from the main news channels. Reporters sacked under government pressure become unemployable. Others are dragged through the courts. Some still test the boundaries, but most are resigned to living inside them. “There’s no need for censorship any more,” despairs a columnist. “Journalists understand what is expected of them.”

The climate of fear, the ongoing state of emergency and the nationalist zealotry unleashed by the coup have made objective coverage of the war in Afrin impossible. “Journalists are incapable of reporting critically without being accused of treason,” says Erol Onderoglu, the Turkish representative of Reporters Without Borders. The internet is no longer a safe space for dissent. In the past month more than 800 people have been detained for protesting against the war on social media. Newspapers that cite the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) when reporting atrocities committed by Syrian regime forces in Ghouta or Idlib ignore the group’s reports from Afrin. The SOHR estimates that at least 112 civilians on the Syrian side of the border have died in the fighting, in addition to seven Turkish civilians killed by rockets fired from YPG strongholds. “All news of civilian casualties is considered as false or as terrorist propaganda,” says Kadri Gursel, a veteran journalist. “There’s a blackout.”