Close Menu
Market Data Newsletter
Monday, September 28
Global Free Speech

8 Turkish journalists face jail for ‘insult’ and ‘false news’ over talk show comments 

News RoomBy No Comments2 Mins Read2 Views
8 Turkish journalists face jail for ‘insult’ and ‘false news’ over talk show comments 

Listen to the article

0:00
0:00

Istanbul, September 23, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Turkish authorities to stop prosecuting broadcasters for commentary after five journalists were charged and three were placed under investigation, accused of either spreading false information or insulting the president in three political debate shows. 

“These cases against broadcast journalists are only the most recent in a series of unjust judicial actions meant to muzzle the press and political opposition,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should welcome critical reporting and commentary as a crucial part of a working democracy, and stop prosecuting journalists.”  

On September 23, Istanbul police took three journalists from critical broadcaster TELE1 into custody while investigating them for insulting the president in an electronic caption during a September 21 broadcast. The banner compared President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu. An Istanbul court released chief editor Merdan Yanardağ, program host Musa Özuğurlu, and programming director İhsan Demir pending investigation. TELE1 issued an apology on Monday.

Earlier this month, newspaper columnists Barış Pehlivan of the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet and Timur Soykan of the daily BirGün were charged with disseminating false information that “implicated the whole judiciary” as guests on an October 2024 talk show on pro-opposition Halk TV discussing alleged judicial corruption and politicization. 

The journalists pleaded not guilty and said their comments were based on public statements and open sources, according to news reports. They each face up to four-and-a-half years in prison if found guilty. 

They are also being separately investigated for “insulting” state institutions on the same show, Cumhuriyet reported.

Also in early September, two Halk TV journalists, Mehmet Tezkan and İbrahim Kahveci, were charged with insulting Erdoğan by comparing his actions to those of Israel in Gaza in a September 2024 Halk TV broadcast. The broadcaster’s editor-in-chief, Suat Toktaş, was also indicted.

The two pleaded not guilty and said they did not intend to insult the president. They each face up to four years and eight months in prison. Trial dates have yet to be set. 

Turkey has consistently vied with China as the world’s worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s annual global prison census.

CPJ’s emails requesting comment from the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office and presidential communications directorate did not receive replies.

Read the full article here

Fact Checker

Verify the accuracy of this article using AI-powered analysis and real-time sources.

Share.

The FSNN News Room is the voice of our in-house journalists, editors, and researchers. We deliver timely, unbiased reporting at the crossroads of finance, cryptocurrency, and global politics, providing clear, fact-driven analysis free from agendas.

Related Articles

Global Free Speech

The BBC clearly sees the value of television series That Mitchell and Webb Look. Marking the 20th anniversary of its original screening, the Beeb has re-released the series on iPlayer. But – and there is very often a “but” with these things – they’ve removed around 11 sketches from the BAFTA award-winning show. The official word is that these sketches don’t “work today”, which is polite speak for “they may cause offence”. The episodes singled out include scenes featuring a battle reenactment with characters in blackface, a contestant on a show wearing a burka and a lost tribe” in a garden centre. These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them; but 20 years on, this distinction seems to have been lost along the way. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this. I find it infantilising, to say the least. Can’t we trust audiences to make up their own minds, to switch off if they find the sketches in question unpalatable? Does the BBC think that we are just passive consumers, unable to disaggregate the mocking of racism from racism itself? These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them This act of censorship is distorting – of the shows, whose narratives and rhythms were built to include these sketches, and more broadly too. Conversations we were having 20 years ago have been erased, as if to suggest that they never happened. But they did! And with this erasure, the opportunity for thoughtful engagement and learning from our past is gone. “Let’s just pretend we were all lovely 20 years ago. It’s better that way” seems to be the message. Speaking as a minority myself, I find that knowing the nasty stuff that people said before – and indeed, still say today – is much more useful than pretending it never happened. This approach, I think, is also inconsistent. What it reveals is a cherry-picking (intended or not) of the groups that we can mock, and those that we can’t. Let’s face it, gender stereotypes are rarely deemed to have aged beyond the pale – if that were the case, we would have to wave goodbye to half the television made before the mid-2010s. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists, namely that what they’re creating today may hold less value tomorrow. Or, even worse, that future audiences may deem them bigots – that Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of any creative paying attention to the discourse of the moment. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists The BBC’s decision reaffirms a broader trend. In 2020, Little Britain was removed from the iPlayer platform for similar reasons. It has since been reinstated – minus some sketches. Meanwhile, the UK’s arts space more broadly is seeing a retreat to the land of “safe”, as Index recently revealed in a year-long investigation into self-censorship in UK theatre. The BBC, it must be said, does remarkable stuff. The ongoing podcast investigation into the disappearance of US journalist Austin Tice is just one example. But this does not mean, however, that they don’t sometimes get it wrong. Chopping at That Mitchell and Webb Look is one example. Sure, the removal of the material isn’t the life-or-death story that Index often works on. Sure, Mitchell and Webb aren’t the faces of persecuted artists – they have huge platforms and agreed to the changes themselves. Still, one can’t help but think that the decision came from a place of conservatism, perhaps even fear. This is weak and dispiriting, indeed the very opposite of what enables creativity in the arts. We shouldn’t be encouraging this cultural timidity. Rather, we should harness culture and creativity as the starting points of a conversation about our here and now. That’s what the arts are for, after all. READ MORE

Add A Comment

Comments are closed.