Amnesty on Turkish media crackdown: 'Disinformation flourishes when media landscape's narrowed down'

Turkey's most popular news channel, Halk TV, was raided by police on Wednesday. Its broadcast of a news story on an investment fund scandal suddenly interrupted to show a classic movie from 1973 instead. The raid, part of a wider government-led crackdown on pro-opposition media. Recep Tayyip Erdogan's administration has now placed its own administrator at the head of Halk TV to ensure it sticks to the party line. 11 people were also arrested among them a journalist and 7 family members of the channel's chairman Kafir Mahioglu who is also named in a warrant but lives abroad for more on this story let's speak with Milena Buyum she is Amnesty International's Turkey campaigner and joins us from London now Milena thank you for being with us first of all can you give our viewers a sense of how important Halk TV in the Turkish media landscape is apologies um it's one of yes no sorry i was muted um it's one of the most popular uh tv channels most uh viewed and the sign of that is also um uh understand it with the you know the social media accounts that were shut that account for millions of people who followed the news on their phones etc it it is one that often in homes you open in the morning you turn on in the morning and you leave on uh throughout the day so it is a very uh brutal uh attack on media freedom in in turkey the news that we woke up to yesterday morning um of the raid and of the state takeover of the channel. It is not the first. In fact, since March 2025, when the operation targeting the greater Istanbul municipality and its mayor, the presidential candidate of the opposition, Ekrem İmamoğlu, started, 10 channels, news channels of various sizes have been actually taken over by state trustees um the the there are just in the last um months seven journalists have been remanded in pre-trial detention uh of under accusations of um uh you know the disinformation uh under the disinformation law etc and so you know the media landscape has been already very much dominated by pro-government broadcasters, newspapers. Now that space for alternative voices, opposition voices, has even further shrunk down, unfortunately, with this attack on Halk TV. Prosecutors in this case accused the channel's chairman, Mahiroglu, of bribery, rigging tenders, and money laundering, he calls the accusations baseless. Is this how the Erdogan government conducts these attacks generally? Well, often, you know, you do not understand, they don't say, prosecutors don't say, we are shutting you down because we don't like what you are broadcasting, what you're saying, what you're publishing. They say that you have broken some laws and indeed investigations should take place if there are credible allegations and people should be brought to justice if there is evidence of any wrongdoing. There are laws and they should be, of course, you know, adhered to to wholesale raid news, you know, broadcast TV station, detain people and sort of take it over by install a manager trustee to take over its operations is extreme in the, you know, in the book anywhere you look in the world. I mean, the equivalent would be Channel 4 in the UK being sort of raided and taken over by the state. It sounds absurd when you place it in a different context. Yet in Turkey, TV stations, you know, as I was saying, in the last 18 months have been taken over by trustees. Another popular, more pro-opposition channel, Telebir, was taken over almost exactly a year ago. So there seems to be a real attempt by the authorities to crack down on the plurality of media even further than they have done in the last decade or so. And it's incredibly worrying. It happens to take place in the context of a very important independent news portal on the internet, T24, that has been shut down to access, although they are continuing to work somehow. People can access social media accounts through VPN, etc. in Turkey. The thousands of people's social media accounts have been closed down. This is taking place in the context of a huge scandal in the stock market, which has impacted apparently around half a million people who have lost huge amounts of money because there was irregularities in the way some investors had internal insider knowledge and took away their investments just before it came crashing down. This is a huge scandal that is touching people in the government. A former minister had to sort of stand down from her position in the ruling party, etc., and was interviewed by police, not held in pretrial detention, by the way, unlike many journalists who are questioned and put in prison for the work that they do. This scandal is taking place and sources of media... This is really part of a wider campaign. We understood this and there were all these other media outlets that were cracked down on before this. What does this tell us about Erdogan's rule currently? Is there a form of fragility there that they're cracking down even harder? That's one interpretation. of course. And, you know, it is impossible to tell how the president and his ruling party feel about things. The reality is that this crackdown goes against the international norms, human rights norms and standards and law that Turkey has signed up to. This brutal frontal attack on media freedom is incredibly serious. People have the right to freedom of information, to receive information, but also to speak, to write and to impart their ideas. So, you know, this crackdown is unacceptable in any context. And in the context of Turkey, where there's so much uh going on there's there is this disinformation that um flourishes actually when the media landscape is narrowed down and these diverse voices these platforms are um shut down t24 is to be is um has been recognized as the the source uh of verification of information and yet The access of people in Turkey to T24 has drastically reduced on the allegation that they were making LGBTI propaganda, that they published over 100 articles sort of promoting LGBTI ideas. This is absurd. It's an absurd allegation against an important part of media landscape in Turkey. Halk TV's closure is shocking and it should be reversed. Their operations should be restored at the earliest opportunity. Milena Boyum, you are Amnesty International's Turkey campaigner. Thank you for sharing your voice to France 24.