Turkey sentences journalist over 4 years in jail for threatening Erdogan
Prominent Turkish journalist Fatih Altayli was sentenced to over four years in prison in a trial government critics say aimed at silencing one of Turkey's most influential journalists and intended to intimidate journalists nationwide.
ANKARA — An Istanbul court on Wednesday sentenced prominent journalist Fatih Altayli to four years and two months in prison over comments deemed threatening to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Altayli will remain behind bars pending appeal.
What happened: The former media executive and popular YouTube commentator was initially arrested in late June, right after remarks he made in a video discussing a poll indicating that more than 70% of Turks oppose Erdogan’s rule. He has remained behind bars since then.
Altayli argued in the video that the Turkish people value the ability to change leadership rather than surrender authority completely, citing historical examples from the Ottoman era when sultans faced overthrow and assassination attempts.
He rejected the charges, which government critics and international and national rights groups denounce as politically motivated and aimed at silencing dissent in the country. Altayli had been publicly targeted on social media by one of Erdogan’s top aides days before his arrest.
Background: Altayli, 63, quit Turkey’s Haberturk TV channel in 2023 and quickly built a massive following on his YouTube channel under his own name, where he offered daily news commentary.
The channel grew to 1.67 million subscribers, making him the largest journalist-run YouTube channel in Turkey.
His daily commentary videos and interviews regularly reached hundreds of thousands and at times millions of viewers.
After he was imprisoned, his team kept his voice alive by filming daily readings of his letters from prison, placing the camera on his empty chair.
Even from an empty chair, his clips drew hundreds of thousands of viewers, as his influence continued to loom large over Turkey’s media landscape.
After the court rejected his release at the second hearing of his case in early October, his team announced a pause in the daily commentary and letter readings.
Reactions: Emma Sinclair-Webb of Human Rights Watch described the ruling as "a travesty of justice."
"Altayli committed no crime," Sinclair-Webb told Al-Monitor. "The high prison sentence is clearly an attempt to justify locking up and silencing a journalist who had a wide public following that made the government perceive him as a threat."
Altayli’s sentencing comes amid a broader crackdown in Turkey, which has seen more than 100 members of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, including Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, imprisoned since March on charges critics say are politically motivated.
"This ruling should be read as a warning to the entire press, using Fatih Altayli and this case as an example," Erinc Sagkan, head of the Turkish Bar Association and one of Altayli’s lawyers, told journalists following Wednesday's hearing.
"At this point, it is no longer possible for me to legally justify or interpret it," he added.
