In a France 24 interview, Amnesty International’s Turkey campaigner Milena Buyum calls the state takeover of Halk TV a “brutal attack on media freedom” — and argues that shrinking the space for independent journalism feeds the very disinformation Ankara claims to fight.
Published 20 October 2026 · 10:06 GMT
ISTANBUL — Amnesty International’s Turkey campaigner has described the state takeover of Halk TV as a “brutal attack on media freedom in Turkey,” warning in an interview with France 24 that the steady narrowing of the country’s media landscape is itself an engine of disinformation. “Disinformation flourishes when media landscape’s narrowed down,” Milena Buyum said, presenting the October 14 seizure of one of Turkey’s most-watched news channels as part of a broader erosion of media pluralism — the appointment of state trustees, the detention of journalists, and mounting restrictions on independent digital platforms.
Buyum’s intervention, published on October 20, places the Halk TV case inside a sustained crackdown on independent journalism that she says has intensified since March 2025. The interview lands six days after hundreds of police officers moved through Halk TV’s Istanbul headquarters, the live feed was cut at 6:30 a.m., and a state-appointed trustee took charge — a sequence Amnesty had already condemned as “a brutal blow to media freedom.”
The facts of October 14 are not in dispute. Police arrived at Halk TV’s Istanbul building before dawn, sealed surrounding roads, and barred staff from entering while financial-crimes officers searched the premises. The channel’s live broadcast was cut at 6:30 a.m. (0330 GMT) and replaced with pre-recorded material; a programmer at the station said editor-in-chief Suat Toktaş pleaded with the incoming trustee delegation to let live programming continue and was refused. The Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office said its financial-crimes unit had been investigating Halk TV chairman Cafer Mahiroğlu over alleged bribery, tender-rigging and the laundering of assets derived from crime. Detention orders were issued for 17 people; 11 were taken into custody.
Prosecutors link the allegations to İzmir municipality tenders and financial transfers involving Mahiroğlu-linked companies. Mahiroğlu, who lives outside Turkey, rejected the allegations as baseless in a video message, called the takeover politically motivated and “a dark day for Turkey,” and said seven of his relatives were among those detained. The timing is established: the raid came the same morning jailed Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu began a scheduled four-day defence in the municipality corruption trial, and days before the first anniversary of the seizure of pro-opposition channel TELE1. Halk TV’s final live interview before the feed was cut concerned the investment fund crisis engulfing the government. Days earlier, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, reinstated as CHP chairman by a court ruling in May, had publicly attacked Halk TV’s coverage. Our full account of the raid is here.
What the trusteeship means for the newsroom is still an open question. The TMSF has not said whether live news broadcasting will resume under its management or whether the channel’s editorial line will be reshaped; the TELE1 precedent — live news suspended, schedules overhauled — is the pessimistic reference, while the Can Holding channels that kept broadcasting after their own takeovers are the optimistic one. It is not known whether the 11 people detained will be formally charged, nor whether any working journalists at the station will face prosecution; ARTICLE 19 notes none of the detained are reported to be editorial staff. The broadcasting regulator RTÜK has not announced proceedings. And the decisive test is editorial: whether Halk TV covers the İmamoğlu trial and the fund crisis with anything like its former scrutiny — or at all.
Halk TV is the fifth major Turkish news outlet placed under trusteeship after Flash TV, Eko Turk, Habertürk and TELE1, according to Reuters — and the tenth television channel put under the TMSF since March 2025, according to a count by the independent outlet bianet. Buyum’s warning gives the pattern a name: when the space for verification shrinks, rumor fills it. Turkey already ranks 163rd of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index, down from 159th a year earlier, and the European Parliament’s Turkey rapporteur, Nacho Sánchez Amor, has accused Ankara of moving from 90 percent media control toward “the 100%.” The paradox Buyum identifies is sharpest around the disinformation law itself: the reporters jailed under Article 217/A in recent weeks were covering a genuine, multi-billion-lira financial scandal — exactly the kind of verification work the law claims to protect.
The genius of the trustee model, as one analysis of the takeovers puts it, is that it never looks like censorship: there is no banning order, no padlock on the door — only a court-appointed manager doing paperwork while a frequency fills with pre-recorded programming. The same legal machinery produced opposite editorial outcomes: the seized Can Holding channels — Habertürk, Show TV, Bloomberg HT — carried on broadcasting, while TELE1’s live news was suspended and its journalists resigned en masse. The variable is not the law; it is the newsroom’s politics.
Buyum’s thesis is a causal claim about information vacuums. A narrowed landscape does not only silence critics; it removes the verifiers — the newsrooms with the sources, archives and legal standing to check a claim before it spreads. Into that vacuum flow rumor, partisan fabrication and state-adjacent narrative management, none of them checkable. The October sequence is her exhibit: the journalists arrested under the disinformation law on October 9 and 10 — two jailed, two under house arrest — were reporting on the investment fund scandal, the biggest real-world disinformation risk in the Turkish economy that week. Prosecuting the verifiers in the name of truth, Buyum’s argument runs, manufactures the very fog the law claims to disperse.
The pressure is not confined to broadcast. The independent news site T24 was shut by court order on September 30; the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD) found that 1,270 X accounts were blocked in Turkey in September alone, only 115 of them backed by a court decision; at the government’s request, X has blocked the accounts of Amnesty International Turkey, the daily Evrensel and the Media and Law Studies Association. On October 12, Amnesty joined twenty rights and media organisations in calling on X and Meta to resist Turkish court orders blocking hundreds of journalist and activist accounts. The TELE1 afterlife shows how thoroughly the system closes the exits: its journalists launched an online successor, TELE2 Haber, in November 2025; the regulator RTÜK then demanded licences it could not afford, and it shut this month. TELE1’s founder, Merdan Yanardağ, remains in prison on espionage charges. The Committee to Protect Journalists counts at least 22 journalists arrested or detained under the disinformation law in 2026 alone.
The immediate future of Halk TV will be decided in two arenas: the courts, where a legal battle over the trusteeship is now inevitable, and the schedule, where the return — or non-return — of live news will signal the trustee’s intentions. The İmamoğlu trial’s coming sessions are the editorial test: the channel that covered the opposition most aggressively is now managed by the state it covered. Press-freedom groups are unanimous on the demand: ARTICLE 19 and the International Press Institute want the appointment reversed; the IFJ and EFJ with their Turkish affiliates call it a grave attack on the public’s right to information; the CPJ wants the disinformation law repealed and every detained journalist freed.
Three paths are visible. The trustee restores live broadcasting and the channel continues under state-appointed management with a softened editorial line — the Can Holding precedent. The trustee keeps the frequency on pre-recorded programming indefinitely while the ownership case grinds through the courts — the TELE1 precedent. Or the legal challenge succeeds and control returns to the channel’s staff, the outcome Amnesty, the CPJ and the journalist federations demand. Which path materialises will be readable, day by day, in the schedule: news or documentaries, scrutiny or silence.
The Western press reads the seizure through the lawfare lens. Reuters frames it as the extension of a legal crackdown on the opposition; the Committee to Protect Journalists calls the disinformation law a one-size-fits-all prosecutorial tool and demands its repeal; France 24 gives Amnesty’s campaigner the platform to name the mechanism. European institutions supply the political grammar — the Parliament’s rapporteur on total media control, the enlargement commissioner warning that media freedom, LGBTQI+ rights and local democracy are widening the gap with Turkey’s frozen EU accession bid.
From the East, the story arrives mainly through wires rather than original reporting — and that is itself a finding. Dhaka’s TBS News carried the Reuters dispatch in full on October 14, giving Bangladeshi readers the raid, the trustee appointment and the opposition’s “only dictators” verdict verbatim. A Japanese community fact-check page deliberated the same events, weighing the corruption-probe justification against the censorship reading.
The South reads the story from inside the affected country’s media. Turkish Minute, staffed by Turkish journalists, caught the detail the wires hurried past: Halk TV’s last interview before the plug was pulled concerned the investment fund crisis engulfing the government, and İmamoğlu was beginning his defence in court that same day. The jailed mayor’s courtroom line — “Our 87 million citizens wake up to a dawn raid every morning… The Republic of Turkey has become the Republic of Raids” — traveled through Turkish and regional outlets, as did Deniz Yücel’s sharper word for the operation: expropriation.
On October 14, 2026, hundreds of police raided Halk TV’s Istanbul headquarters before dawn, cut the live broadcast at 6:30 a.m., and barred staff from the building. The Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office appointed the state-run Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF) as trustee of the channel and linked companies, as part of a financial-crimes investigation into chairman Cafer Mahiroğlu.
Amnesty’s Esther Major said the dawn raid and trustee takeover of one of Turkey’s main opposition channels is “a direct assault on the right to freedom of expression” and appears to be the latest attempt to silence opposition voices. Turkey campaigner Milena Buyum added that the intervention is a “brutal attack on media freedom,” part of a crackdown intensifying since March 2025.
The Savings Deposit Insurance Fund is a state institution empowered under Turkish law to take control of companies in certain legal circumstances. Prosecutors used it to seize Halk TV and firms linked to Mahiroğlu during the probe. It is the fifth such media trusteeship — and, per bianet’s count, the tenth TV channel placed under TMSF since March 2025.
Buyum’s thesis is that shrinking the independent press removes the verifiers — newsrooms able to check claims — so rumor fills the vacuum. The irony she points to: journalists arrested under Turkey’s 2022 disinformation law in October were reporting on a real investment fund scandal, the very verification work the law claims to protect.
