About 160 journalists are in jail while over 150 media outlets have been shut down

A satirical cover for a political news magazine was all it took to see its editor eventually sentenced to more than two decades in prison.

Cevheri Guven, editor in chief of Turkey’s Nokta magazine, fled while out on bail late last year, smuggling his family out of a country he says is rapidly descending toward all-out dictatorship. He took refuge in Greece, where he applied for political asylum.

Mr. Guven is far from alone in feeling the full force of the Turkish government’s wrath against press critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, particularly after last year’s failed coup attempt. About 160 journalists are currently in jail, while more than 150 media outlets, from broadcasters to newspapers and magazines, have been shut down, leaving thousands unemployed.

Mr. Erdogan bristles at accusations he is muzzling the press, saying authorities are simply rooting out criminals. He disputes figures from rights groups about the number of imprisoned journalists.

“There can be no question of limitless freedoms in the press. If the media abuses all kinds of freedoms to cause turmoil in the country or to cause provocations, then there is the judiciary for them too,” he said on Wednesday, addressing foreign investor representatives in Istanbul. “The judiciary will work for them too. Nowhere in the world can there be limitless freedoms. The West does the same to freedoms and its media members.”

Erdogan’s insistence

Asked at the end of last week’s G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, about the media situation, Mr. Erdogan again insisted that those arrested had been detained for criminal activity.

“Journalists commit crimes too and when they do the judiciary makes the necessary assessment,” he said. “I want you to know that those you know as being members of the press are mostly people who aided and abetted terror.”

Pressure on Turkey’s media is nothing new. Ranked 155th out of 180 countries in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, Turkey fared marginally worse than it had the previous year, when it was ranked at 151.