Turkey
Turkey’s media landscape is shaped by a highly concentrated ownership structure in which major television and print outlets are largely controlled by conglomerates known for their close ties to the government, while independent media, both legacy and digital, operate with limited financial and regulatory support, narrowing the space for dissenting voices.
In an increasingly constrained environment, economic pressures and changes to platform algorithms have deepened structural imbalances in the Turkish media sector. Advertising revenues in Turkey are concentrated among global technology companies and pro-government outlets, which limits the financial sustainability of independent journalism. Demirören Media is the largest media organisation in Turkey, with TV brands such as Kanal D, CNN Turk, and the Hurriyet newspaper and website. Turkuvaz’s portolio includes TV channels ATV and A Haber.
Meanwhile, the state continues to expand its influence over media ownership by placing seized assets under trusteeship, such as when Turkish authorities took control of Can Holding (owners of Habertürk TV, Bloomberg HT, and Show TV) and transferred its business to the state-run Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF). TMSF, which is officially responsible for recovering debts from failed financial institutions, has been aiding media restructuring by seizing outlets via indebted parent companies and then facilitating their transfer to owners who are politically aligned with the government. A small number of opposition-leaning and independent outlets continue to operate, such as Sözcü TV and Halk TV, albeit under increasing pressure both from the authorities and market conditions.
In parallel, a series of algorithm updates, particularly Google’s, between August 2024 and March 2025 were associated with traffic reductions of up to 80% for independent online outlets.1 While some digital outlets are experimenting with reader-funded models, these remain limited in scale and insufficient to overcome structural vulnerabilities. Opposition-leaning Gazete Duvar closed in 2025, citing falling readership and financial difficulties.
Against this backdrop of economic and structural challenges, regulatory enforcement continues to intensify. This year, the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) has expanded its reach by requiring independent YouTube channels with large followings, such as those of well-known independent journalists, to obtain licences in order to avoid access bans. Since March 2025, coverage of the arrest that month of Istanbul’s elected mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, who is widely regarded as Erdoğan’s most prominent rival, has become a central focus of RTÜK’s measures across both legacy and digital media. The contested aftermath of İmamoğlu’s arrest, including mass protests and boycotts, has been accompanied by detention and travel bans for opposition-leaning journalists and commentators becoming increasingly routine. At the same time, broadly defined legal provisions relating to ‘insulting’ the president and ‘threatening’ national security or public order have enabled a steady expansion of what counts as punishable speech in the Turkish media landscape, which has further blurred the line between reporting, opinion, and offence.
Declared the ‘Year of the Family’ by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, 2025 also saw increased media restrictions presented as a defence against the promotion of deviance by ‘barons of global culture’.2 Turkish authorities' emphasis on morality coincided with intervention across diverse forms of content and distribution channels. While at the policy level, the Ministry of Family instructed officials to avoid terms such as ‘gender’ and ‘sexual orientation’, public campaigns that framed the visibility of LGBTQ+ as a societal threat were on the rise. Along similar lines, fines and removal orders targeted streaming platforms (e.g. HBO Max, Netflix, Prime Video) over content depicting same-sex relationships.
Complementing these efforts to control the media landscape, social media companies’ compliance with government takedown requests has reached high levels, with TikTok at 91.8%, X at 85.7%, and Instagram at 79.2%,3 while authorities have introduced measures that further restrict online participation, including national ID verification requirements that would severely obstruct online anonymity. Periodic internet throttling during politically sensitive moments, alongside continued restrictions on platforms such as the popular livestreaming platform Discord and the blocking of VPN services, point to the state’s capacity to curb internet freedoms.
Meanwhile, on the supply side, Turkey introduced its first large language model, T3AI, which was developed through collaboration between the defence firm Baykar, state broadcaster TRT, and pro-government Anadolu Agency. Presented as an example of ‘ethical’ artificial intelligence, T3AI remains in a nascent stage relative to leading US-based competitors, while reflecting how state-led technological efforts can be integrated into broader regulatory ambitions to shape content production and its governance.4
Jim Egan
Senior Research Associate, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
TV and print continue to decline over the long term while social media has not recovered from its 2022 peak. Online remains dominant over offline, and AI chatbot use has risen to 14%, up 6pp.
Share news via social, messaging or email
38%
(+2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
60%
(-1)
Trust in news overall
28%
(-5)
Global average: 37%
Trust in Turkish news brands has generally declined over the past year. Opposition-leaning broadcasters, such as Sözcü TV and Halk TV, still score relatively higher while some pro-government outlets (such as ATV, Sabah and A Haber) have lower trust. The gap reflects deep political polarisation and growing perceptions of increased state influence over the information and media landscape.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
163/180
Score 27.94
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://turkiye.ipi.media/letter-to-google-letter-to-google-urging-action-on-algorithmic-impact-on-independent-media/
2 https://www.iletisim.gov.tr/english/haberler/detay/we-placed-the-principle-of-strong-women-strong-family-strong-turkiye-at-the-center-of-our-vision-for-the-century-of-turkiye
3 https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social-media-companies-censorship-turkiye
4 https://www.dailysabah.com/business/tech/beta-version-of-1st-turkish-large-language-model-t3ai-launched