Turkey's negative media image: It is not a conspiracy
Charges of 'Orientalism' ring hollow in light of the civil rights abuses committed by PM Erdogan's government.
In a recent Opinion piece for Al Jazeera, a senior adviser to Turkey's ruling AKP party, Ertan Aydin, made note of "a resurgence of media orientalism on Turkish democracy", a claim that Bloomberg journalist Marc Champion (a target in Aydin's piece) described as "playing the Orientalism card." Aydin's main thesis was that much of the less-than-positive international news coverage afforded Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the past year can be attributed to archaic worldviews rooted in the notion that Islam and democracy are incompatible - a position echoed by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan. In the particularly acid conclusion to his piece, Aydin wrote that "Turkish intellectuals and journalists from the opposition parties" were "sore losers" who had "manipulated and aided Western media's Orientalism" in an attempt to destabilise the AKP government.
More:Turkey's negative media image: It is not a conspiracy - Opinion - Al Jazeera English