It has been a bad month for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and so, as has been the pattern in Turkey for the past 17 years, it has been an even worse month for those Turkey’s mercurial ruler wishes to scapegoat.

After having lied about Turkey’s immunity to the coronavirus crisis in its initial weeks, Erdogan and his advisers now seek to deflect blame and attention elsewhere. Under Erdogan, Turkey’s press freedom has been atrocious. In his first decade at Turkey’s helm, Erdogan benefited in the early years of his crackdown by liberal apologists such as Cengiz Candar, now at the Stockholm University, who defended the arrests and blamed criticism of Erdogan on Jewish animosity Candar and others deflected from an ominous trend: In Reporters Without Frontiers’ annual survey of press freedom for 2002, the year before Erdogan formally took power, Turkey ranked 100, near Israel and above countries such as Russia, Belarus, and Afghanistan. This year, it is below them and looks poised to join the ranks of Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia in the coming year. Just as Erdogan called the 2016 abortive coup “a gift from God” because it enabled him to declare a state of emergency and jail opponents for little or no cause, so too has Erdogan now used the coronavirus crisis to crack down on remaining media.