Turkish President’s Allies Increasing Pressure on Times and Reporter
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Version 0 of 1. Turkey’s president and his supporters have been denouncing The New York Times and one of its Istanbul correspondents with growing furor for the past three days, reacting to an article and photograph about the recruitment of fighters in Turkey by the Islamic State, the militant group that has seized parts of neighboring Iraq and Syria. Despite protests by the newspaper and press-freedom advocates, the denunciations have turned personal, punctuated by threats conveyed via email and social media against the correspondent, Ceylan Yeginsu. On Friday, leading pro-government newspapers controlled by allies of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, published front-page photographs of Ms. Yeginsu, who is Turkish, and suggested she was a traitor and a foreign agent. Her motive, they said, was to malign Mr. Erdogan in a “perception operation” by insinuating that he is a closet supporter of the Islamic State, a group that Turkey, along with the United States and many other countries, classifies as a terrorist threat. It was the photograph in particular, which showed President Erdogan visiting a mosque in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, that appeared to be the catalyst for the backlash against The Times and Ms. Yeginsu. Mr. Erdogan called it “despicable, vile and shameless,” contending it implied a connection between the Turkish government and the Islamic State. The photograph, posted on the newspaper’s website, was promptly removed after Mr. Erdogan complained. The Times published a correction asserting that editors had erred in using it. The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, issued a statement Thursday that the article never said or implied that Mr. Erdogan supported the Islamic State or condoned the group’s recruitment in Turkey, and that the photograph also was not meant to imply such support. Even for Turkey, known as a hostile environment for journalists, the reaction by Mr. Erdogan and his supporters was considered strong. It came against a backdrop of resistance by Mr. Erdogan to American-led pressure to join a coalition of nations that have pledged to eradicate the Islamic State by force. “There may be some strategic lashing out, but it’s also important to keep in mind that Erdogan is a very thin-skinned individual,” said Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based advocacy group. “He takes criticism very personally.” Mr. Erdogan, who routinely castigates and even sues journalists he regards as enemies, had been angered over a New York Times article last Sunday about Turkey’s role as a conduit for oil sales by Islamic State smugglers and the Turkish government’s apparent reluctance to curb them. When Ms. Yeginsu’s article was published a few days later, he turned even more furious. “Perception operation turned out to be the work of a local,” the front-page headline in the Aksam newspaper said on Friday. Takvim, another pro-Erdogan daily, asserted that some people who had been mentioned in Ms. Yeginsu’s article were fictitious. The Times has stood by the reporting on both articles, saying they speak for themselves. And despite the published correction, Mr. Baquet wrote in his statement, “some Turkish authorities and media outlets have mounted a coordinated campaign to intimidate and to impugn the motives of the reporter who wrote the story.” “She has been sent thousands of messages that threaten her safety,” he wrote. “It is unacceptable for one of our journalists to be targeted in this way.” Mr. Baquet said that The Times expected “the Turkish authorities to work to ensure the safety of our journalists working legally in the country.” There was no sign of conciliation in the coverage in Turkey by the pro-government news media on Friday. Akit, an Islamist newspaper, said in reference to the removal of the offending photograph from The Times’s website: “The New York Times licked what it spit.” Ms. Yeginsu, a Columbia Journalism School graduate who started as a reporter and editor for Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News & Economic Review in 2008 and began working for The Times in 2013, is only the latest in a series of journalists in Turkey who have been publicly vilified by Mr. Erdogan and his allies. Last month, Mr. Erdogan denounced Amberin Zaman, the local correspondent for The Economist, as “a shameless militant disguised under the name of a journalist” and told her to “know your place,” The Economist reported. He was reacting to her interview with an opposition figure the day before. In July, Mr. Erdogan asked the Ankara Public Prosecutor’s Office to conduct a criminal inquiry against the editor in chief of the English-language newspaper Today’s Zaman on charges of insulting him in Twitter postings. The newspaper is aligned with an exiled Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gulen, an influential adversary of Mr. Erdogan. Other journalists criticized by Mr. Erdogan and pro-government newspapers in the past year include Ivan Watson of CNN International and Selin Girit and Rengin Arslan of the BBC. “We are very concerned about journalists who work for people’s right to information targeted in such a direct way,” said Sibel Gunes, general secretary of the Turkish Journalists’ Association. Nina Ognianova, regional coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said, “Turkish authorities must abandon once and for all their aggressive antipress rhetoric, which translates into tangible risk for the journalists singled out.” |