Turks Angry Over Dearth of Protest Coverage by Established Media
A television at a bar played a speech by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week in Istanbul
(The New York Times) – The Turkish government blames Twitter. Many Turks point their fingers at a cowed news media.
As protesters took to the streets of Istanbul and other cities, confronting security forces wielding water cannons, plastic bullets and tear gas, the leading Turkish television channels stuck with scheduled programming: a cooking show, a nature documentary, even a beauty pageant. To find out what was going on — and, the government maintains, to fuel the violence — Turks turned to Twitter and other social media.
On Wednesday came the backlash. The semiofficial Anatolia news agency said the police had detained 25 people on suspicion of using Twitter to incite crime. The arrests underline Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s antipathy for social media, which he denounced on Sunday as “the worst menace to society.”
Mr. Erdogan singled out Twitter for what he called its role in escalating protests that began last week in Taksim Square in Istanbul and quickly spread to other cities, saying, “The best examples of lies can be found there.”
Critics of the government acknowledged that misinformation flourished on Twitter and other social media, with incorrect reports that the crackdown had resulted in large numbers of deaths, and digitally altered photos said to be of victims.
But they added that the rumors spread because the established news media were guilty of a lie of omission.
“Of course there is a dark side to Twitter,” said Asli Tunc, a media professor at Istanbul Bilgi University. “But if the mainstream media had done their job better, there would be less of this.”
