On the 8^th anniversary of the assassination of Armenian-Turkish editor Hrant Dink, Rober Koptaş in Agos noted that the AKP government has recently started to emphasize that police officers close to the Gülenist fraternity were implicated in the 2007 assassination. Aydın Engin in Cumhuriyet called on the opponents of the AKP regime not to put any faith in dissensions within the governing party leading to the fall of the regime. Kadri Gürsel in Milliyet similarly wrote that Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is never going to put up a fight against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Several columnists have brought up the recent attack against Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Yusuf Kaplan in Yeni Safak writes that the attack was the work of the French “deep state” in order to increase Islamophobia. Orhan Kemal Cengiz in Bugün writes that pious Muslims must stop hiding behind conspiracy theories, and Nuray Mert writes on the Diken news site that blaming such attacks on groups created by the West is simply an attempt to pretend that there is not a major problem that Muslims need to tackle. 

The detentions of Gülenist media personalities have led to a discussion whether or not they deserve support in the name of the freedom of expression, against the background of the joint Gülenist-AKP assaults against the opposition and media in the past. Ekrem Dumanlı, the editor in chief of the Gülenist daily Zaman, who was one of those who was detained, defends past editorial policy, writing that “We honestly appropriated the Ergenekon investigation and lent whatever earnest support to it that we could,” because, he claims, there were many known examples of journalists collaborating with coup makers. Dumanlı concedes that some things that were published may have been “over the mark,” but he asks critical colleagues to support him nonetheless and not “make the same mistake against us.” Güray Öz in Cumhuriyet writes that “no journalist can be deprived of support because of what he has done in the past,” but that the assault against it today does not absolve Gülenist media from its responsibilities for what it has committed in the past.