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Turkey’s Anadolu agency threatens to sue 2 British editors

Turkey’s Anadolu agency threatens to sue 2 British editors

CEO and director-general at Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency, Kemal Öztürk (L) is seen at a press conference along with Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç. (Photo: Cihan)

April 10, 2014, Thursday/ 16:22:00/ TODAY'S ZAMAN / Ankara

CEO and director-general at Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency, Kemal Öztürk, has said that two British editors calling Anadolu a “propaganda machine” of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an article published by Vice magazine will be sued both in Turkey and England.

In the article “We Quit Working for Erdoğan's Propaganda Mouthpiece” published on the UK site of Vice international magazine on Tuesday, journalists Kate O'Sullivan and Laura Benitez said, “We joined the agency in January, hired to edit English-language news, but quickly found ourselves becoming English-language spin-doctors.”

Öztürk posted a tweet in English in the early hours of Thursday morning, saying “I will speak to you in the language you understand.” The tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of a note.

“The article written by the 2 British journalists that have recently departed from Anadolu Agency has made some guile [sic] people very excited. Theslandering [sic] journalists will stand before in court in both Turkey and England for their lies against Anadolu Agency,” Öztürk said in his note on Twitter.

He continued: “The website that belongs to [Rupert] Murdoch which originally published the article and the Turkish media involved will be sued as well. AA [Anadolu] consists of 1200 journalists from 60 nations worldwide working in 81 different countries. Losers cannot work at AA. The embarrassing part is not what the slanderers said, rather, the ignorance of the Turkish people who are clinging to this matter.”

The two applied for the job at Anadolu after seeing an ad in the Guardian daily.

 

“The agency's editorial line on its domestic politics – and Syria, in particular – was so intently pro-government that we might as well have been writing press releases,” they wrote in their article. The editors said Anadolu was once a point of national pride, but today “it's just at the end of another set of strings in the ruling AK Party's [Justice and Development Party] puppet parade..”

Öztürk, a former press adviser to Erdoğan, is described in the article as a “government cabinet wannabe.” With exclusive access to ministers, the agency could report about domestic affairs as soon as events in the ruling party unfolded, O'Sullivan and Benitez said, adding: “Sources, often the most difficult part of a reporter's job, were also a breeze: ‘The Foreign Minister told me, so yes it's true' -- no second source-checks needed. The domestic news editing policy was, essentially: don't ask questions. Ever.”

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