I’m posting this not because of Trump but because of Tufekci, who coincidentally I’ve been banging on about lately. Here’s why:
The NYT and CNN played a crucial role in legitimizing the narrative that the threadbare events in Turkey in July 2016 were a coup; if those two outlets had been more skeptical, the rest of the world press would have followed suit. Erdogan couldn’t have been more obvious about targeting CNN: ostensibly terrified for his life and uncertain about military sympathies, he fled in a private jet — and gave CNN an exclusive Facetime interview complete with call-sign/location data while he was flying around off the coast near Istanbul.
The NYT’s unassailable expert on the ground was Tufekci, and her Twitter stream from Antalya airport during the events were pivotal in establishing the NYT’s view. But check out the first 3 paras of her story about Trump here, where she describes how she just knew it was a coup.
To be clear: there’s no question that some sort of military uprising really happened in Turkey. I think it was a Truman Show affair, nurtured by Erdogan’s regime to justify massive purges and create a lever in its US diplomacy to get their hands on Fethullah Gülen (the same issue they turned Mike Flynn over a few months later, right?).
Tufekci’s involvement is a minor detail, uninteresting in itself, but the consequences of the NYT giving its imprimatur to the coup narrative were immense. As always: Tufekci is an excellent writer and she does good. AND ALSO there’s always something weird about her columns. This one’s no exception. Her account here of the Turkish coup in the context of Trump is just a gambit to position herself as an expert on coups, but if you read it on its own it’s really strange.
Her tweets during the events were much less confident than she claims here. So, to what does she now attribute her confidence to? Something “a neighbor who held rank in the Turkish military” told her mother 30 years ago. Paint me skeptical.