Many people may not realize, but Turkey is a relatively new country--just shy of 100 years old. It was created as a republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, largely by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who stuck around as president until 1938.

Since then there have been elected governments, military coups and now a -- well, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reshaped the country in his own likeness - or at least how he likes.

To help us make sense of it all, we’ve invited Andrew Finkel onto the show. Finkel has been a journalist based in Istanbul since 1989, corresponding and freelancing for a variety of print and broadcast media that has included The New York Times, The Times, TIME, The Economist, The Guardian, the Observer, CNN, and the Financial Times as well as Turkish language media. His popular handbook: Turkey What Everyone Needs to Know” is published by OUP (2012).

• Recorded on 7/8/20
• Is Turkey a free country? “No.”
• Who is Erdogan?
• What went down during the coup of 2016
• The Gülen of it all
• The state of Turkish journalism
• The fight over social media
• The immunity of Western media
• How Covid is effecting things
• Strangling the economy
• What are the lessons of Turkey’s rise of authoritarianism? 

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