In a December 2, 2006 article on Turkey's Today's Zaman [1] website, Zafer Ozcan writes that the Turkish government's practice of accrediting certain news agencies to cover offical events amounts to censorship. Below are excerpts from his article, and a link to the full article on the Today's Zaman website.

Today, a number of state institutions, including the General Staff, resort to accreditation and restrict the access of the disliked media organizations into the institution concerned.
While accreditation is announced publicly for some occasions, sometimes only certain reporters and organizations are invited to official events, where the undesired are left out through non-invitation...

...The fundamental problem with accreditation practices in Turkey is vagueness. The institutions relying upon this practice are often reluctant to publicize their rationale behind their specific preferences. Member of the Press Council Supreme Board and communication specialist Professor Haluk Şahin stressed that accreditation should be based on objective criteria. But what can this objective criteria be? For instance, only allowing newspapers that exceed a certain level of circulation, the visual press or only domestic or international press representatives would be few newspapers. Professor Şahin contends that nobody would object to such a clearly defined accreditation practice. "But discrimination based on ideological concerns or other similar reasons may have negative repercussions. You do not know what to do in order to be entitled to accreditation. The institutions that comply with the preset rules should be given accreditation. Today, each eminent institution should also restructure itself as a communications organization. This is the only way to manage the communication processes in the information age. We are no longer a closed society..."

Click here to read Ozcan's article in its entirety on the Today's Zaman website. [2]