The Washington Post may have offered Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a platform for his views on last week’s massacre in New Zealand in the interests of providing wide-ranging views, but without adequate context the newspaper has simply served as a propaganda tool for the Turkish president, Columbia Journalism Review columnist Jon Allsop said on Thursday.
Erdoğan’s Tuesday op-ed in the venerable U.S. newspaper was a model of reason, adopting a “measured, conciliatory tone” to argue that the gunman who killed 50 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was no different to extremist jihadists of the Islamic State, said Allsop.
The content of the Turkish president’s article, however, could not be more different to his inflammatory rhetoric on the event back home.
As Turkey gears up for local elections on March 31, Erdoğan has been making inflammatory statements about the attack, including accusations that Western intelligence agencies were involved, at the frequent rallies on the campaign trail.
Erdoğan’s campaign propaganda centred on Christchurch has included showing at televised rallies clips of the footage the gunman live-streamed as he shot down his victims.
“On Monday , the day before his Post op-ed was published, Erdoğan talked about Gallipoli, a World War I military campaign that saw the Ottoman Empire repel troops from Australia and New Zealand. Each year, thousands of people from those countries visit Turkey to commemorate Anzac Day,” Allsop said.
“This year, Erdoğan warned, anti-Muslim visitors would go home in coffins, ‘like their grandfathers,’” he said.
The comments justifiably enraged the Australian and New Zealand governments, yet the next day, Erdoğan, said Allsop, was the “picture of diplomatic innocence” in his op-ed, praising “the courage, leadership, and sincerity of New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.”
The Washington Post and other well-regarded broadsheets have a history of giving space to controversial figures. Erdoğan has had one other op-ed published in the Washington Post in the last year, and another in the New York Times.
Both newspapers have no qualms about calling the Turkish president out, and have noted the hypocrisy in his previous op-eds.
“The most troubling aspect of the Erdoğan op-eds, however, does not concern the boundaries of legitimate speech as much as their lack of context. The internet age has disaggregated newspapers and their opinion sections, spinning op-eds into standalone pieces as they circulate around the web,” said Allsop.
The Turkish president’s words are thus presented to thousands of readers, through social media or other channels, without any background. Since news of Erdoğan’s electioneering tactics is not necessarily widely known, the Christchurch op-ed could therefore appear innocuous to readers, Allsop said.
The newspapers have employed AI algorithms to present readers with related stories in order to add context or opposing viewpoints, however, Allsop said, this is insufficient.
“(Links) aren’t enough, in cases like this, to adequately contextualize a tyrant’s untrammeled message about a sensitive topic during a campaign season,” Allsop said. “Let him propagandize at his rallies, not in the pages of The Washington Post.”