A small but feisty newspaper with a skeleton staff and a backlog of unpaid wages is taking on the establishment and shaking up the compliant Turkish media.

Confrontational and not afraid to break taboos, Taraf faced down the military to expose the ultranationalist Ergenekon, or Deep State, group and 86 alleged members, including senior military officers, are now on trial accused of trying to engineer a coup.

Set up by disaffected liberal journalists, backed by a small publishing house and produced in a fourth-floor flat above a fish stall, the newspaper has made almost as many headlines as it has written in a country where media self-censorship is the norm.

Turkey has undergone political and economic reform as it seeks to become the European Union’s first Muslim member, but its media fails to hold the ruling class to account. It was listed as 103rd out of 173 countries for freedom of the media in a report released recently by Reporters Without Borders.

Heavily wedded to big business interests and bathed in ideology, the Turkish media is often pro-government by necessity and pro-establishment by instinct.

“This is a beautiful country. So why are we so weak, mired in poverty, overwhelmed by bloodshed? What must we do to live like humans?” asks the Editor, Ahmet Altan.

When the first rumours of the Ergekenon group began to emerge, mainstream newspapers dismissed the story – but Taraf published reams of documentation allegedly showing the make-up and aims of the group, which it said had infiltrated every part of Turkish life.

With the start of the trial, the rest of the Turkish media has finally caught up with Taraf and, like the small newspaper, now refers to it as the “trial of the century”.

“We have shown that taboos can be broken in Turkey and the world does not collapse around us,” said Yasemin Congar, the deputy editor.

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