(Bloomberg) — Turkey’s media watchdog warned three Western news organizations, including Washington-based Voice of America, that they could be banned if they didn’t apply for web broadcast licenses.
Foreign websites have become increasingly popular in Turkey as the government tightens its grip on local media.
The broadcast authority, known as RTUK, said the Turkish language websites of VOA, Bonn-based Deutsche Welle and Lyon-based Euronews needed to apply for licenses because they were publishing video news, according to Ilhan Tasci, an opposition member at the authority. The regulator has the right to go to court to seek to ban the websites if they fail to do so.
“This decision is an intervention against press freedom,” Tasci told Bloomberg. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party dominates the authority’s board. RTUK Chairman Ebubekir Sahin didn’t immediately respond to Bloomberg when contacted by phone.
In 2018, Turkey revised its media regulations to allow RTUK to supervise online broadcasts. Since the new regulations went into effect, various streaming platforms including Netflix and Amazon Prime have applied for and received licenses.
RTUK’s broadened powers gave the government more leverage against critics in a country that already monitors social media closely and has previously hampered access to websites, including Twitter. The country has also been one of the world’s biggest jailers of journalists for several years running, and ranks 153 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’s World Press Freedom Index.
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