A Turkish opposition lawmaker has criticized a media bill currently before parliament, saying it would restore punitive powers to Turkey’s official advertising agency despite a Constitutional Court ruling that curtailed similar authority, the Bianet news website reported.
The bill would give the Press Advertisement Agency (BİK), which distributes public advertising to newspapers and online news outlets, new sanctioning powers. It also would allow the agency’s governing body to set standards for internet news sites, including criteria on staffing, content, the number of stories published and readership.
Utku Çakırözer, a lawmaker from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), said the proposal would again give BİK the authority to punish critical media outlets.
“Since BİK was tied to the presidential Communications Directorate, poor management has dominated the institution,” Çakırözer said during a debate in parliament. “Because the institution is not being managed properly, journalism in Anatolia has come to the point of collapse.”
BİK was established to regulate the distribution of official advertising, an important source of revenue for many local newspapers. Çakırözer said the agency had become a tool for penalizing newspapers critical of the government.
He cited penalties imposed before the Constitutional Court annulled BİK’s authority to cut public advertising, saying the sanctions had disproportionately targeted critical newspapers.
According to the MP, 76 percent of advertisement-cutting penalties in 2019 and 50 percent in 2020 were imposed on the Cumhuriyet, BirGün and Evrensel newspapers, all critical of the government.
“Thankfully, the Constitutional Court stopped this guillotine and said this was a systematic violation of press freedom. But now you are again asking us for the authority to impose penalties on your own initiative,” he said.
Çakırözer said granting BİK new sanctioning powers could lead to arbitrary penalties against newspapers.
“If you try to rain arbitrary penalties on newspapers again through militant bureaucrats and pro-government professional organizations given this authority, it would be unconstitutional, and you would be committing a crime,” he said.
The proposal comes amid long-running concerns over media freedom in Turkey, where opposition parties and press rights groups have accused authorities of using courts, regulators and public advertising mechanisms to pressure critical outlets.
Çakırözer said the bill failed to address the most urgent problems facing the press, including financial strain, low pay for journalists and the absence of a legal framework requiring digital platforms to compensate news organizations for using their content.
“Turkey’s press is dying, but we do not see even the smallest effort before us to keep it alive or create new resources,” he said.
He said digital platforms benefit from content produced by news organizations without directing revenue back to publishers.
“Is there digital copyright, one of the most basic needs of the press, in this law? No,” Çakırözer said. “Why are the copyright laws introduced by Europe, Australia and Canada to protect their own publishers not here?”
Çakırözer said responsibility for issuing press cards and setting and enforcing professional standards for journalists should be taken away from presidential officials and transferred to press organizations.
He said local newspapers across Turkey face severe economic pressure and are being pushed to close or merge. He also said the criteria imposed on internet news sites push outlets toward click-driven journalism rather than public-interest reporting.
“Journalism and social benefit have been forgotten,” he said.
Çakırözer accused BİK of directing resources that should support local media and underpaid journalists toward executive compensation and spending he said was not properly audited.
“There is a black box before us that turns limited resources, which should go to our Anatolian press and journalists forced to work for wages below the hunger threshold, into executive allowances, spends them on work contrary to public procurement rules and is not audited in any way,” he said.
Çakırözer said BİK is legally subject to audit by Turkey’s Court of Accounts but has not been effectively audited for years.
Turkey, which remains one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, according to press freedom organizations, dropped to 159th out of 180 countries in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in early May.
