The Young Turks

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
One of the

Pundits

Icon pundit.svg
And a dirty dozen more

The Young Turks, or TYT, is an online news show dedicated to liberal politics and pop culture topics created by pundit Cenk Uygur.

Starting out as a radio program in 2002, The Young Turks has been broadcast in various media over the years. Cenk Uygur had a short stint on MSNBC in 2011 before being dropped. TYT then aired on CurrentTV before the channel itself was shutdown and sold due to poor ratings. The show is now broadcast exclusively on YouTube.[1]

Contents

[edit] Meaningful content

The Young Turks is openly progressive (by American standards) in its politics, and devotes much time to criticizing the high-handedness of the GOP. TYT's commentators have also been extremely critical of the Obama administration, decrying its conciliatory attitude towards the GOP.[2]

Uygur and company are also highly critical of the American "War on Drugs,"[3], the militarism of the United States military, the imperialism of the American government, corporate power and personhood, Israeli policies and the treatment of the Palestinians, politicians' hypocrisy, Christian fundamentalism, sexual harassment, homophobia, the influence of money in politics, the mainstream media failing in their jobs at being watchdogs instead of lapdogs, fundamentalist religion, extreme atheism, and a myriad of other issues that would force a cold sweat down Washington's neck.

[edit] Less-than-meaningful content

The Young Turks makes heavy use of clickbait-and-switch, luring in viewers searching for a trending video or news story, who instead are treated to ten minutes of TYT's opinions of said video or story. They cater to a youthful demographic, and cover topics of prurient interest. Uygur and his production staff spend a lot of time talking about sex. As TYT is expanding, they are shunting the silly stuff to other "channels."[4]

The TYT Network has also expanded to host other shows covering various topics by partners and collaborators. Outside those run by the main production staff however, these can run the gamut from light-hearted liberal humor[5] to a visual hard-left version of Truthout.[6]

[edit] Political activities

Although many would think journalists should report news, not make news, The Young Turks promotes Uygur's political action committee, known as "Wolf PAC." Its declared goal is to reduce the role of money in the political process.[7][8] Cenk Uygur started it as a response to the Citizens United ruling, with the ultimate goal being to amend the Constitution again to limit the amount of money that any one person or organization can give to any one politician. He already has Vermont, California, Illinois, and New Jersey on the board for the convention.

[edit] Armenian Genocide shiftiness

TYT host Cenk Uygur, who is Turkish-American, has been accused of denying the Armenian Genocide, something that members of the Armenian-American community protested over as recently as February 2012,[9][10][11] based on two pieces he wrote in 1991[12] and 1999.[13] His co-host Ana Kasparian (Armenian-American herself) defended him on Twitter in 2010 saying "that op-ed is from 11 years ago" and "people change their political opinions all the time."[14] She did so again in 2012 against a fellow Armenian-American on the latter's blog,[15] though in both cases she does not directly address his current views on the issue.

Additionally, the program shares its name with some of the founding members of the Turkish regime which had undertaken the Armenian Genocide. Uygur has stated it was based on the dictionary definition meaning "young progressives looking to overthrow an established system," though he did not directly address his past writings.[16] Note that dictionaries also list the historical Turkish regime as the origin of the term; this meaning is what offends some Armenians.[17] Given his Turkish background, it seems unlikely that Uygur would be unaware of the historical regime and its connection to the Armenian Genocide.

In 2013 during a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session Cenk again refused to clarify his position, despite the fact that the most upvoted question was regarding the Genocide.[18]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support