The New York Times has said that the Trump administration was prepared to allow one of its Irish journalists to be arrested in Egypt.
A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, has claimed that the paper was forced to turn to the Irish Government to help one of its Irish reporters in Egypt, for fear that Donald Trump’s government would not intervene to prevent his arrest.
In an opinion piece published on Monday after Sulzberger had earlier delivered it as an address at Brown University, he said that, in 2017, the paper received a call from a US government official to inform him that a New York Times journalist was going to be arrested in Egypt.
The journalist in question was Irishman Declan Walsh and Sulzburger said that the newspaper were of the belief that the US government were going to sit on the information and were willing to let the arrest happen.
Sulzberger wrote: “Unable to count on our own government to prevent the arrest or help free Declan if he were imprisoned, we turned to his native country, Ireland, for help.
“Within an hour, Irish diplomats traveled to his house and safely escorted him to the airport before Egyptian forces could detain him.
“We hate to imagine what would have happened had that brave official not risked their career to alert us to the threat.”
The piece references the increasing danger of being a journalist, as the rise of the term “fake news” continues.
It says that the term fake news “has been used by liberal leaders, like Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar. It’s been used by right-wing leaders, like Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro.
“Standing next to President Bolsanaro in the Rose Garden, President Trump said: “I’m very proud to hear the president use the term ‘fake news.’”
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
