(City Journal) — Mainstream media in the Trump era have fashioned themselves as tribunes of the people and arbiters of truth. “Democracy dies in darkness,” warns the Washington Post; the New York Times intones, “Truth. It’s more important than ever.” With the election of a Republican president, the media have rediscovered constitutional government. Suddenly, executive power must be constrained again. Checks and balances are all the rage. Federalism and states’ rights are no longer racist “dog whistles,” but essential antidotes to a domineering central government.
And yet, while the media clang their alarms about how Donald Trump is supposedly turning America into a fascist dictatorship, they largely neglect the fact that democracy really is dying in other parts of the world.
In Turkey, for instance, Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s recent referendum victory allowed him to consolidate power over all three branches of the national government. Erdoğan’s triumph followed on the heels of a failed coup, which he may have staged, and which enabled him to jail and thereby sideline thousands of political opponents. The media miss the broader context of these events: Turkey has now all but completed its transformation from a secular, Kemalist nation to an Islamist dictatorship.
