For much of the 2000s, Turkey underwent a process of social, political, and economic transformation toward what beneficiaries of these changes termed, "conservative democracy." During this period, Turkey's media landscape was transformed to cater to the interests of a new "conservative democratic" elite that redefined state-media relations to perpetuate the interests of its clients and patrons. The impact of these transformations reached a tipping point in the summer of 2013 when during the early days of the Gezi Park protests, Turkey's primary producers of mainstream news either under covered the events at Gezi Park, or remained silent altogether. Indeed, despite widespread international coverage, breaking news from Turkish sources in the first week of the uprising was both sparse and monolithic; and this was as true for government-sympathetic media as it was for so-called mainstream and mass opposition media. Did the forces of conservative democracy crush Turkey’s Fourth Estate? This paper draws on research conducted among mainstream journalists in Turkey to suggest that although the Turkish free press has long had problems with a managerial state apparatus, recent efforts to control media coverage reflect a new era of social control and social critique. Authoritarian dictates from above, although still present, have given way to patterns of self-censorship brought on by corporate media consolidation and fears of economic (i.e., civil) retribution. Exemplified by the emergence of a new "activist media," however, the findings of this research suggest that rather than crushing free speech all together, the collapse of the mainstream has created new opportunities for critique. Drawing from qualitative data collected among a diverse sample of media professionals, this paper concludes that although successful in stymieing dissent in the short term, increasing control of public discourse in Turkey is creating a space for durable social critique in a more diverse public sphere.