The news media landscape

On paper, Turkey’s media scene looks fine. In reality, it’s a mess. The country runs hundreds of newspapers and dozens of national TV channels, and its internet penetration sits among the highest in the region, hovering around 88.3% at the start of 2025 and pushing past 90% by the second half of the year, per DataReportal and the national stats office, TurkStat.¹ But size doesn’t equal pluralism. Reporters Without Borders puts roughly 90% of national outlets under direct or indirect government control.² And it’s not always state ownership in the strict sense, either. The reality is messier. Pro-government holding companies, Demirören, Turkuvaz, Albayrak, scooped up flagship titles like Hürriyet, Sabah, and ATV after the previous owners hit legal or financial trouble, and those papers and channels now mostly parrot President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP almost line for line.

The big outlets shape what most Turks actually consume. TRT, the public broadcaster, sets the official tone. Sabah, Hürriyet, and Yeni Şafak dominate print and digital on the pro-government side. On the opposite end, smaller and often financially shaky outlets like Sözcü, Cumhuriyet, BirGün, plus broadcasters such as Halk TV, Tele1, and Now TV, try to fill the gaps, with international players like BBC Turkish, VOA Turkish, and Deutsche Welle Turkish picking up the rest, mostly online.³ What gets covered? Erdoğan, mostly. Always Erdoğan. After that: the lira, inflation, the Kurdish conflict, earthquakes (especially after the 2023 disaster), migration, and Turkey’s balancing act between NATO, Russia, and Syria. What rarely sees daylight: corruption stories, the wealth of Erdoğan’s inner circle, and any serious look at how state institutions actually run.

How press freedoms operate

Technically, press freedom in Turkey is guaranteed. Article 28 of the Constitution flatly says the press is free and shall not be censored. Then you keep reading, the next paragraph, the next law, the one after that, and the guarantee basically evaporates. Censorship works through a tangle of penal code articles, anti-terror statutes, and a 2022 “disinformation” law that makes “publicly spreading misleading information” punishable by up to three years behind bars.⁴ Journalists routinely get hit with Article 299 (insulting the president) and Article 301 (insulting the Turkish nation or its institutions). Meanwhile, the broadcasting watchdog RTÜK slaps critical TV stations with massive fines and broadcast bans, while the Press Advertisement Institution (BIK) starves opposition papers by cutting off state ad revenue.⁵

Compared with the United States, the gap is glaring. The First Amendment treats government interference with the press as a baseline constitutional violation. New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) made it almost impossible for public officials to win defamation suits against journalists without proving “actual malice.” In Turkey, a single tweet about Erdoğan can put a reporter in pretrial detention by sunrise. There’s no Sullivan equivalent. No real shield law. Internet censorship is close to systematic, thousands of sites and social accounts get blocked every year, and platforms like X have repeatedly throttled bandwidth inside Turkey to fall in line with takedown demands.⁶

The risks reporters face aren’t abstract. They’re physical. Journalists covering protests get tear-gassed, beaten, or hauled off on the spot. Critical reporters deal with dawn raids, asset seizures, travel bans, and prosecutions framed as “terrorism” or “disinformation.” CPJ’s annual prison census has consistently put Turkey near the top of the worst-jailers list, and as of 2025 more than a dozen journalists were locked up for their work.⁷ Foreign correspondents fare only a little better. Press accreditation can be pulled with no explanation, visas denied, and reporters, including those working for major Western outlets, have been deported, detained at the border, or, like Deutsche Welle’s Alican Uludağ in February 2026, detained in their own homes.

A specific case: Alican Uludağ

On the evening of February 19, 2026, police showed up at the Ankara home of Alican Uludağ, a court reporter for Deutsche Welle’s Turkish service, and took him in. The charge: “insulting the president” under Article 299, tied to his social media posts and his coverage of politically charged trials.⁸ Uludağ isn’t some fringe blogger. He’s a veteran court reporter, the exact kind of journalist a working democracy needs sitting in the back of a courtroom. He was filing for a German public broadcaster, not running an underground operation. None of that protected him.

What really stings about the case is how unremarkable it has become. Article 299 has been used against thousands of people since Erdoğan came to power, including children, opposition politicians, and reporters whose supposed “crime” was paraphrasing a leaked document or quoting a critic. In April 2026, CPJ, RSF, and 22 other press freedom groups put out a joint statement condemning Turkey’s pattern of weaponizing the disinformation law and the insult laws against journalists, and called for both to be repealed.⁹ Turkey shrugged.

Uludağ’s arrest is the whole story in miniature: a working journalist, a foreign-funded outlet, a vague speech crime, an evening raid. This isn’t censorship by accident. It’s censorship by design.

The modern average human occasionally forgets to take his phone to the bathroom with him in the morning. Then the sorcery of revolutionary philosophy unfurls within him and lasts for some insignificant minutes until he is done and is expected to return to his pragmatic world. Unlike the modern man, ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle got to spend their entire existence inside a bathroom where the walls were made out of security and comfort and it would shower privilege and inherent resources. Their thinking would be questioned but their freedom to think would not.

Then, perhaps a shiny bathroom never unfurled that freedom inside the modern man. It was the fourth sin that never let him realize he might not be hanged for defying god.

And in every other universe…. it doesn’t end well… but stIll I love you.. not to seek a happy endIng but to celebrate the love I have for you. To show you that I stayed not because i wished to witness the happy ending; not because i prayed to witness a glimpse of love in your eyes; not because i desired the love I deserved; but because to love you Iis to giIve; to love is to suffer; to love you Is to smIle; certaInly to love you Is to not expect you to be mIne; to love Is to sacrIfIce; my love to love you Is to gIve everythIng to you thIs world has to offer and in return? InsIst you to smIle; to love you my beloved my stupId, Is to be blessed enough to be able to kIss on your forehead and stare at those dazzliIng eyes.

My desire of her runs deep, deeper than the depth of my soul. I want her but want is an insufficient word to unfurl what i crave, for, i crave and regret every breath we make separated. But togetherness or mere her presence will not bring calm to my raging desires. I shall continue exploring her presence and my eyes need to bleed until I cannot look at anything else but her maroon eyes. But looking at her till eternity is not enough. I need to experience her smile, that sharp smile that is sharp enough to obliterate admirers certainly enough to validate my existence. But all that is not enough! I used to believe my want of her is infinite until of course; I realized my love for her is infinite yet superior. But how can that occur, how can my infinite unconditional love be grander than my infinite desire for her to be mine. That is when I discovered mathematically, thematically and rationally that one infinity can be bigger than the other despite both containing endless run. It’s like a parallel line moving endlessly without any object to stop them, however! At all times, one line slightly stays ahead of the other. I love her and i love her a little more than I want her. God somehow made a slight miscalculation I guess, when he created us. She did not have to bother creating worlds and be all powerful to be adored and respected yet i made her his equal! the goddess she deserves to be, for I sometimes or at all times, worship her endlessly, INFINITELY more than I ever obey him.

Synopsis

A father and his thirteen-year-old daughter arrive in New York from Nepal with almost no money and a cousin’s living room to sleep in. He delivers food by bicycle. She watches the strangers on the street and can’t understand why she’s supposed to copy them. Between them is the mother who didn’t make the trip, remembered as pure light.

ALIENATED follows the family across three generations, ending with a grandson leaving home at seventeen. Each narrator reports exactly what happened. None of them reads it right.

From Chapter Two: Hansukh

Excerpt from a draft in progress.

Synopsis

He believes that loving someone completely, whatever it costs, is the most honest thing a person can do. Chrysalis Can follows what that belief does to him, and where the love has to go once it has nowhere left to land.

The novel moves in three parts:

1. can i
2. can i kiss you?
3. i can

Draft in progress.