the Turkey gave Deutsche Welle an ultimatum of 72 hours on Monday, within which the German foreign broadcaster must apply for a broadcasting license in Turkey. Otherwise there is a risk that DW’s journalistic offerings will be blocked on the Internet. According to the deputy chief of the Turkish media supervisory authority RTÜK, Ibrahim Uslu, the same applies to the US foreign broadcaster Voice of America and the news channel euronews based in Lyon. Turkey is referring to a media law that came into force in 2020, which also forces social media with a certain number of users to set up branches in Turkey – Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have now done so. Critics of the law say that the AKP government wants to use it to control the internet and social media as a means of communication for the opposition.
DW director Peter Limbourg announced on Tuesday that he would object to the required licensing in Turkey. He announced that DW would take legal action before the Turkish courts. Limbourg saw the measure as an “attempt to restrict international media in their reporting” after the local media “already are subject to extensive regulation”. It is not about “formal aspects of the distribution of programs, but about the journalistic content itself”. The Turkish authorities were given the opportunity to block the entire service based on individual critical reports if such reports were not deleted. That enables censorship. Limbourg pointed out that DW had set up a liaison office in Turkey in accordance with the law passed in 2019 and had been registered as an offer with the responsible Turkish ministry since February 2020.
In Russia, DW is blocked, and in Germany the media regulator has questions
DW, which is financed by federal budget funds, has another problem after the broadcasting and work ban imposed on DW by Russia at the beginning of February diplomatic turmoil led. The decision in Moscow was made after the German media regulator banned the state-affiliated Russian broadcaster RT DE from broadcasting its program on the Internet because the offer does not have a broadcasting license in Germany. RT DE, on the other hand, relies on a Serbian license that is valid in Europe and is currently legally defending itself against the media regulator’s decision. On the Russian side there is talk of a media war.
Meanwhile, the German media regulator is also currently examining whether broadcasting Deutsche Welle’s programs in Germany is compatible with media law. The DWDL specialist service had first reported on this. As a spokeswoman for the state media authorities confirmed when asked by SZ, the specialist committee on regulation will deal with the topic at its meeting in early March. DW can be received in Germany via Magenta TV and the ARD media center as a live stream. According to the German media regulator, it must now be clarified to what extent domestic broadcasting is covered by DW’s mandate in the Deutsche Welle Act – according to which DW has the task of broadcasting radio and telemedia for foreign countries. For technical reasons, however, there could be “an overexposure to Germany” – “we are in talks with DW about the type and extent of the overexposure and its limits.”
Deutsche Welle is also currently struggling to process a scandal in connection with anti-Semitic statements by employees. External examiners Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger and Ahmad Mansour recently had that result of their investigations and stated that while there was no structural anti-Semitism in the Arabic editorial team, there was a system in which it could thrive.