TRT World retaliates against Reuters job posting

A job posting from news agency Reuters for a deputy office manager in Turkey drew backlash from Turkey’s state-run English language news agency TRT World. In the posting Reuters described Erdoğan’s Turkey as having ‘’diverged from its secular traditions’’ and reminded of Turkey’s dire economic crisis. The Chairman of the Directorate of Communications Fahrettin Altun was quick to protest Reuters while TRT World retaliated with its own job posting.

Reuters’ “Deputy Bureau Chief” ad on LinkedIn read:

‘’President Erdoğan has transformed Turkey in his two decades in power, shifting it from modern secular traditions and turning it into an assertive diplomatic and military presence in regions stretching from South Caucasus to Northern Africa. We need someone with strong writing and reporting skills who can deliver deep-dive enterprise stories at the same time as supporting our high-performing team covering a critical juncture in Erdoğan’s rule – with runaway inflation and a battered lira combining to threaten his bid for re-election in the months ahead.’

Government aligned Media: “They are looking for hitmen, not journalists.”

Media organizations with close ties to the AKP government including Yeni Şafak, Akşam and Sabah headlined the job posting with critical commentary such as “Reuters is looking for anti-Erdoğan journalists” and “They are openly showing adversary to Erdoğan”

Altun shared a screengrab of the advertisement on Twitter and commented:

“Reuters strays from reality and instead espouses a biased view of what has happened to ‘modern secular traditions’ in Turkey under President Erdogan. These phrases can only make sense in a propaganda brochure. This is not journalism.”

“A media outlet should ask journalists in the field the facts before employing their preconceptions of what is going on as the main line of the story. Reuters would do well to review the content of this posting while keeping in mind the journalistic principles of ‘independence, honesty, impartiality and reliability’ it claims to adhere to.”

Retaliation from TRT World

The English-language state news agency TRT World was quick to retaliate with a job posting of its own. Advertising also on LinkedIn, TRT World announced an opening for a field reporter in London. As a pun on the original Reuters’ ad, the job description included an uncharacteristic segment of issues facing the UK:

‘’We are looking for a dynamic and experienced journalist to help lead an agenda-setting news file from the United Kingdom, a NATO member and pivotal regional power with outsized influence in European and Middle Eastern security. Failure of consecutive governments to respond  to challenges like Covid 19, Brexit and global economic crises left Britain in political turmoil. Short lived government’s put the UK’s future in uncertainty, shifting it away from Europe. The death of Queen Elizabeth II reignited the debate about the future of the monarchy, as many people questioned it as a way of rule from the Middle Ages in a modern world…’’ 

Timothy Ash joined the discussion

Timothy Ash, a renowned British economist, weighed in on the discussion on Twitter, quoting a post from TRT World: “Cannot disagree with anything in the write up of the challenges facing the U.K. We have become a banana republic.’’