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* Burak Bekdil: Turkey: Erdoğan Fishing for Trouble in the Aegean Sea - Again
* Daniel Greenfield: How the Media Used Russiagate Conspiracy Theories to Create a News Cartel


** Turkey: Erdoğan Fishing for Trouble in the Aegean Sea - Again ([link removed])
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by Burak Bekdil • July 5, 2022 at 5:00 am
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* Various opinion polls put [Erdoğan's] popularity at less than 30%, compared to the 52% with which he won re-election in 2018.
* Many Turks, although starving, are nevertheless proud that they have a leader who can confront the "infidel West" -- including their traditional rival and neighbor, Greece. It is precisely this feeling that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose popularity has been plummeting in recent months, sees as a national weakness to stoke.
* What should Erdoğan do, therefore, as former loyalists of his powerful Justice and Development Party (AKP) seem to be deserting en masse?
* Erdoğan has already set the stage for the new episode of his theatrical extravaganza. His coalition partner, ultranationalist leader Devlet Bahçeli, claimed that U.S. military bases in Greece pose a "direct threat" to Turkish security... How could a peaceable NATO ally, Greece, pose a direct threat to another NATO member, Turkey, home to US military bases? Are US bases in Turkey a direct threat to Turkey?
* Erdoğan did not mention that the same treaties also ban the militarization of Turkey's islands in the Aegean Sea and Turkey's Dardanelles and Bosporus straits.
* Fortunately, all these theatrics are about barking, not biting. Turkey does not have the political, military or economic might to invade a member of the EU... Turkey invading Greece is not Russia invading Ukraine. Erdoğan is a gambler who has used the same tactic for domestic consumption many times before. The ruse never ended up in a war across the Aegean. This one is no exception: Erdoğan, whatever he is, is not suicidal.

Many Turks, although starving, are nevertheless proud that they have a leader who can confront the "infidel West." President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sees this feeling as a national weakness to stoke. Warmongering, the Islamist strongman evidently calculates, may convince Turks to support revisionist bullying and ignore their misery. Pictured: Erdoğan addresses the media representatives at the NATO summit in Madrid, on June 30, 2022. (Photo by Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images)

Turkey is a year away from presidential and parliamentary elections. Many Turks are starving. Literally. Their per capita GDP of around $9,500 has crushed many of them under a triple-digit inflation rate and a fast-depreciating national currency, while independent economists warn that this may be only the beginning of worse torment in a country of 84 million people, excluding 9 million refugees and migrants.

Many Turks, although starving, are nevertheless proud that they have a leader who can confront the "infidel West" -- including their traditional rival and neighbor, Greece. It is precisely this feeling that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose popularity has been plummeting in recent months, sees as a national weakness to stoke. Warmongering, the Islamist strongman evidently calculates, may convince the Turks to support revisionist bullying and ignore their misery.

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** How the Media Used Russiagate Conspiracy Theories to Create a News Cartel ([link removed])
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by Daniel Greenfield • July 5, 2022 at 4:00 am
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* The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook paid over $20 million to the New York Times and $15 million to the Washington Post in annual fees. Even more valuable than the big checks was Facebook's ability to push media content to its users. Last year, sources at several publishers were crediting Facebook News with massive traffic surges, but not everyone was equal.
* "Many other U.S. news publishers are getting payments from Facebook to have their content featured in its news tab, but they only get a fraction of the sums paid to the Washington Post, the New York Times," the Wall Street Journal noted.
* Facebook and the media had created a cartel in which media sites created paywalls to raise the value of their content and gain better deals with the social media monopoly. Zuckerberg's company offered its biggest media critics big checks in exchange for exclusive deals. Both sides claimed that they were "fighting misinformation" with what was really a shakedown and a cartel.
* When the media accused Facebook of spreading conservative misinformation, the only defense was providing special privileges for the media. Despite the fundamental illegality of such cartels, Democrat politicians and the media openly pressured Facebook to promote "responsible" journalism, by which they meant their own political content, at the expense of "misinformation".
* By then the entire debate about misinformation had boiled down to creating a two-tiered content system across Big Tech that would fund and push media content while suppressing rival material. This urgent need for a news cartel was described as the best way to meet the "threat to democracy" posed by the "wild west" of the internet. This cynical rhetoric carefully avoided any discussion about the benefits that would flow to the media from this arrangement.
* Recent entries from the Washington Post, which was being paid $15 million, include, "Facebook Gives Gun Sellers 10 Strikes Before Ban" and "Facebook Fails Again to Detect Hate Speech in Ads": both of which went viral. The former taps into the new mania over gun control to manufacture yet another crisis involving Facebook. And crises reward the media cartel.
* The two interlocking cartels, Big Tech and the media, became politically and then economically interdependent in a way that was both illegal and deeply dangerous to a free society. The lies, the conspiracy theories and the censorship are products of technopolitical collusion between two sets of corrupt companies that have devastated our politics, our culture and our country.
* The two cartels set out to control our speech and our politics for their own power and profit. They did it by manufacturing a crisis and declaring that their abuses were the solution.
* Both Big Media and Big Tech cartels need to be broken up before they break our society.

(Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)

In the fall of 2019, Facebook announced that it would be writing selected media outlets some very big checks. The launch of Facebook News was billed as a way to give consumers more access to information, but it was actually an attempt at appeasing big media companies.

Facebook, with its older and more conservative user base, had become the epicenter of election conspiracies from the Clinton campaign and its media allies. While Hillary Clinton and her associates were eager to shift the blame for her defeat by relaunching their existing Russiagate smears with false claims that Russian Facebook ads had tilted the election to Donald Trump, the media's obsession with Facebook was even more corruptly self-interested.

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