The Corner

Trouble in Turkey

The TMSF, Turkey’s banking board, has seized control of an independent media group on allegations of past irregularities. Affected is the newspaper Sabah and television stations ATV and Kanal 1. While the TMSF was long apolitical, over the past four years, Prime Minister Erdogan has replaced its seasoned technocrats with Islamists financiers, many trained in Saudi Arabia, and it has a pattern not only of targeting secular businessmen and companies, but ignoring court judgments against it. Background here. As Turkey heads toward elections next month, it needs more independent media, not less.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Civil-Military Relations, and a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
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