Media are a strange beast. Reading them right, and dealing with them effectively, is one of the greatest challenges of modern times.
Questions to ask when dealing with the media is who are the media outlets working for?
And what political, religious, cultural and personal stripes do they wear?
And those stripes are not always easy to spot. And the media agendas are not always easy to identify and unravel.
As a result, with regard to any news story that the media report, a question that one can never get rid of is this:
Is this particular story true?
How much of it is true?
And what could be the possible or true origin of the story,
regardless of how the media themselves source that story?
So, keeping all those caveats in mind, here is a story from Turkey, reported in one of the Turkish media.
Read it how you will and make of it what you will.
The news report, and I am paraphrasing it here fairly closely, says that President Erdogan of Turkey has decided to withdraw all suits filed in his name pertaining to the charges of "Insulting the Nation's President."
The defamation suits Mr. Erdogan thus decided to withdraw are said to number 2000.
Mr. Erdogan was reported as saying that he was withdrawing these suits in the spirit of the unprecedented unity that the Turkish nation as a whole displayed in resisting the 15th July military coup.
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