The Breakdown of Trust in Turkish Media
The Digital News Report 2025 offers key insights into why news engagement in Turkey has reached historic lows, offering a glimpse into how political power structures may be fueling this trust deficit.
Turkey ranks among the countries with the lowest levels of interest in news. According to the Digital News Report 2025, 61% of the population say they sometimes or often avoid following the news. This places Turkey second—after Bulgaria (63%)—among the 48 countries surveyed. Notably, the rate of news avoidance is higher among women (66%) than men (57%). When compared to countries where news avoidance is least prevalent—such as the Nordic countries (Finland and Denmark at 27%, Sweden at 26%) and certain Asian countries (Taiwan at 21%, Japan at 11%)—the widespread nature of news avoidance in Turkey becomes even more striking.
This picture becomes even more significant when viewed in relation to levels of trust and distrust in major media outlets. According to the same report, the most trusted news organisations are Now TV (61%), Sözcü TV (54%), Halk TV (53%), and Cumhuriyet (52%). These outlets also rank among those with the lowest levels of distrust. What sets them apart—beyond their relatively high trust scores—is their editorial stance, which is markedly distant from pro-government narratives. This distance appears to translate into greater credibility in the eyes of the public.
In contrast, outlets such as Hürriyet, Kanal D, Milliyet, ATV, Sabah, and A Haber rank among both the least trusted news organisations and those most frequently perceived as unreliable. Notably, ATV (44%) and A Haber (47%) stand out as the media outlets considered the least credible by the public. These organisations have consistently maintained a partisan, pro-government editorial stance, which likely contributes to their low credibility ratings.1
There is a clear reason why trust in Turkey’s mediascape is so closely tied to relationships with the government: press-party parallelism. This dynamic is far from new. Since the 1980s, the commercialization of the media sector has led to its consolidation under a handful of major conglomerates. Business figures investing in media have routinely leveraged their outlets to gain political and economic advantages by aligning themselves with ruling parties and government interests.
However, the AKP’s rule since 2000s gave press-party parallelism a new direction. Through a combination of punitive tax fines, defamation laws, and the imprisonment of journalists, major media organisations were systematically pressured, brought under control, and eventually acquired by pro-government business elites. As a result, the overwhelming majority of Turkey’s media landscape today is concentrated within the pro-government camp—a development made possible by this orchestrated transformation.
This transformation of the media landscape is also one of the key reasons why Turkey’s political regime is widely classified as competitive authoritarianism. In such regimes, incumbents maintain the façade of democratic institutions—such as elections and a pluralistic media—but systematically distort them to their advantage. In Turkey, the ruling party has effectively used the media to construct an uneven playing field, limiting the opposition’s access to mass communication while amplifying pro-government narratives. The consolidation of media under pro-regime business interests, combined with censorship and legal pressures, has significantly undermined media pluralism, turning a tool of democratic accountability into a mechanism of authoritarian resilience.
New communication technologies—most notably YouTube—have become vital platforms for journalists seeking to amplify critical voices. In the aftermath of the government's capture of mainstream media, YouTube has emerged as a key space where prominent journalists, ousted from traditional outlets, have been able to continue their work. Yet even on these platforms, journalists operate under legal pressures. The experiences of widely followed YouTube journalists such as Nevşin Mengü, Özlem Gürses, and most recently Fatih Altaylı, offer powerful examples of this precarity.
There is little need to search elsewhere for the causes of widespread news avoidance and distrust in media. Traditional media is steadily losing credibility under the shadow of an authoritarian regime. While alternative platforms have emerged, their position remains deeply fragile and vulnerable to pressure.
As the research was conducted in January and February 2025, it does not capture the CHP’s media boycott that followed the İmamoğlu protests. Consequently, the report offers no insight into how this boycott may have influenced public trust in the media.
