The news from Istanbul this week lands like a heavy stone in still water, sending ripples far beyond the courthouse steps. Four Turkish journalists, two of them now behind bars and two under house arrest, are paying a price for doing what reporters are supposed to do: looking too closely at power and asking uncomfortable questions. Mustafa Balcı, an editor at the independent newspaper Sözcü, and Şaban Sevinç, editor-in-chief of the online news channel Bizim TV, were ordered jailed pending trial after sharing and publishing material that linked a ruling party spokesman to a man caught up in a widening…

There is a peculiar kind of irony in watching a man who built a career warning about the media’s manipulation of public opinion become, in his own right, a master of distortion. Leo Brent Bozell III, the United States ambassador to South Africa, made his name in the conservative world as a watchdog, co-authoring with Tim Graham the 2004 book Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media. In it, he accused the American press of bending the news to serve a left-wing agenda and of manipulating the national conversation from behind a veneer of objectivity. He…