CNN should revoke the license of its Turkish correspondent, CNN Türk, for censorship and hate speech, former Turkish lawmaker Aikan Erdemir and Toby Dershowitz, vice president of the Foundation for the Defense of the Republic, told Newsweek.
On December 8, CNN announced that it would send a team to Turkey to review the broadcasting policy of the Turkish licensee.
"CNN Türk's pro-government policies, along with its hate speech, show that CNN's sister network is now a platform involved in conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic tropes and racist rhetoric," Erdemir and Dershowitz said.
CNN Türk was founded in 1999 as a joint venture between Atlanta-based CNN and Dogan Group, then Turkey's largest media group. CNN promised to provide branding and know-how to the "brother" channel in exchange for licensing CNN Türk to broadcast all of CNN's original content exclusively in Turkey.
"The channel became synonymous with self-censorship when it aired a documentary about penguins in 2013 instead of broadcasting demonstrations in Gezi Park against the Erdogan government's authoritarianism," Erdemir and Dershowitz said.
In 2018, CNN Türk and other major media outlets from the Dogan Group were sold to the Demiroren Group, a businessman-ardent supporter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"Since then they have been broadcasting news with anti-Semitic, racist and conspiratorial content.
"Jews rule the world," he said. "They control 27% of the US economy," a former Turkish ambassador told CNN Türk in April.
"The network has also targeted black people on Twitter and the online news platform," said Erdemir and Dershowitz.
A CNN delegation visited the offices of CNN Türk in 2019 following allegations of impartial coverage of the municipal elections. Some changes have been made to the broadcaster's management, but not to the journalistic staff covering the Turkish government, Erdemir and Dershowitz said.
In 2020, the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) announced a boycott of the network for repeatedly distorting the party's image and lodged a complaint with CNN.
Erdemir and Dershowitz claim that CNN's latest visit to CNN Türk provides an opportunity to take action.
"This belated move gives CNN the opportunity to disconnect its signal from one of the top propaganda tools of Turkey's increasingly authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan," they said. "It's too late for CNN to revoke CNN Türk's license and its hate content."