Trump just threatened to shut down news outlets critical of him. That's what's happened in Turkey.
Update: Trump doubles down, calls it "disgusting" that "the press is able to write whatever they want to write and people should look into it"
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that one of its journalists, Ayla Albayrak, had been convicted of “engaging in terrorist propaganda” by a Turkish court over Albayrak’s reporting in the Journal on a Kurdish separatist party banned in that nation. The move was condemned by the Journal’s editor-in-chief, Gerard Baker, and press freedom advocates.
Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian government has closed down more than 150 media outlets in recent years and imprisoned at least 200 journalists, according to the Stockholm Center for Freedom. But the move to prosecute and imprison a reporter for a Western media outlet for terrorism is extremely unusual. When Turkey arrests such reporters, the country can usually expect vigorous protests from the outlet’s home government.
But President Donald Trump did not take to Twitter this morning to condemn Turkey for its outrageous act. Instead, in a move that must have warmed Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s heart, he offered up his own unrelated authoritarian condemnation of the American press.
The president of the United States, in response to critical reporting about his administration, is calling for federal government reprisals against the outlet that produced that reporting. That the threat seems uninformed does not make it less chilling -- what matters is the president seems eager to use the power of government to restrict critical journalists.
This is what dictators do. First they criticize the media, and then they use the power of the government to crush them.
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/10/11/trump-just-threatened-shut-down-news-outlets-critical-him-thats-whats-happened-turkey/218195
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