This article may be unbalanced toward certain viewpoints.(March 2018) |
Type | Daily newspaper |
---|---|
Format | Broadsheet |
Owner(s) | Feza Publications |
Editor | Sevgi Akarcesme [1] |
Founded | 2007 |
Ceased publication | July 2016 |
Headquarters | Bahcelievler, Istanbul, Turkey |
Website | www |
Today's Zaman (Zaman is Turkish for 'time' or 'age') was an English-language daily newspaper based in Turkey. Established on 17 January 2007, it was the English-language edition of the Turkish daily Zaman.Today's Zaman included domestic and international coverage, and regularly published topical supplements. Its contributors included cartoonist Cem Kızıltuğ.
On 4 March 2016, a state administrator was appointed to run Zaman as well as Today's Zaman. [2] Since a series of corruption investigations went public on 17 December 2013 which targeted high ranking government officials, the Turkish government has been putting pressure on media organizations that are critical of it.[ citation needed ]
As of 9 March 2016 [update] , the website of Today's Zaman had not been updated since 5 March, while all archived articles prior to March 2016 were removed.
On July 20, 2016, five days after the military coup attempt, Today's Zaman was shut down after an executive decree by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; arrest warrants were issued for 47 former staff. Zaman was described by an official as the "flagship media organization" of the Gülen-led movement. [3] CNBC described the newspaper as "what used to be Turkey's number one English daily" before its shutdown. [4]
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a Turkish politician who is the 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously served as the 25th prime minister from 2003 to 2014 as part of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which he co-founded in 2001. He also served as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998.
Zaman, sometimes stylized as ZAMAN, was a daily newspaper in Turkey. Zaman was a major, high-circulation daily before government seizure on 4 March 2016. It was founded in 1986 and was the first Turkish daily to go online in 1995. It contained national (Turkish), international, business, and other news. It also had many regular columnists covering current affairs, interviews, and a culture section. The newspaper is known for its closeness to Fethullah Gülen, the leader of the Gülen movement. The newspaper originally supported the Justice and Development Party (AKP), but became increasingly critical of that party and its leader, Turkish president and former prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, particularly after the AKP closed the 2013 December investigation into corruption. On 4 March 2016, in what activists and international media groups criticized as another blow to press freedom in Turkey, control of the newspaper was seized by the government. The takeover was motivated by the newspaper's ties to the Hizmet movement of Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, which the government accuses of attempting to establish a parallel state in Turkey.
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Muhammed Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish Muslim scholar, preacher, and leader of the Gülen movement who as of 2016 had millions of followers. Gülen is designated an influential neo-Ottomanist, Anatolian panethnicist, Islamic poet, writer, social critic, and activist–dissident developing a Nursian theological perspective. that embraces democratic modernity, Gülen was a local state imam from 1959 to 1981, and he was a citizen of Turkey until his denaturalization by the Turkish government in 2017. Over the years, Gülen became a centrist political figure in Turkey prior to his being there as a fugitive. Since 1999, Gülen has lived in self-exile in the United States near Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
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