Top Turkish newspaper fined

ANKARA: An Ankara court on Thursday fined one of Turkey’s top newspapers for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a column, as tensions between government and media grow ahead of June 7 elections.
The court deemed that the August 25, 2014 column by one of the star commentators on the Hurriyet daily, Mehmet Yilmaz, was an “attack on the personal rights” of Erdogan.
It ordered the newspaper’s chairwoman Vuslat Dogan Sabanci and Yilmaz himself to pay 20,000 lira ($7,760) in damages to Erdogan, the official Anatolia news agency reported. Erdogan’s lawyers had requested 100,000 lira ($39,000) damages in the civil case. His lawyer Muammer Cemaloglu was present in court for the verdict.
The report gave no details on the nature of the article. But Hurriyet had on August 25, 2014 published a lengthy article by Yilmaz recalling extensive corruption accusations against Erdogan, two weeks after his victory in presidential elections.