Donald Trump and Republicans have an ally in their fury that a member of the press dared challenge Trump at his long-awaited press conference Wednesday, Jan. 10. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thought it was just great how Trump called CNN “fake news” and berated CNN reporter Jim Acosta:
“Mr. Trump put the reporter of that media group in his place there,” Erdogan said triumphantly.
That is just who you want approving of how the U.S. president treats the media—a president under whom Reporters Without Borders ranks Turkey as 149th out of 180 countries when it comes to press freedom. Meanwhile, Freedom House says:
Media freedom in Turkey deteriorated at an alarming rate in 2015. The government, controlled by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), aggressively used the penal code, criminal defamation legislation, and the country’s antiterrorism law to punish critical reporting, and journalists faced growing violence, harassment, and intimidation from both state and nonstate actors during the year.
And he thinks Donald Trump is doing a bang-up job for yelling at a reporter because he didn’t like a story the network ran. No doubt Erdogan would also approve of Trump spokesman Sean Spicer’s threat to have Acosta removed if he challenges Trump at a future press conference, and of Rep. Randy Weber’s call for Acosta to be fired. If, however, you care about a free press, Trump was the problem:
The National Press Club also lamented Mr. Trump’s behavior, saying in a statement: “Presidents shouldn’t get to pick and choose which reporters’ questions they will answer based on what news outlet for which they work.”
As the Columbia Journalism Review’s Peter Vernon argued, other reporters at the press conference should have acted in solidarity with Acosta—maybe “picked up Acosta’s line of questioning, or even refused to continue asking questions until the President-elect acknowledged the organization he had earlier attacked.” And if Trump doesn’t like it, at least he’s got Breitbart and the National Enquirer on his side.