ANKARA (Al Jazeera/Middle East Eye) – President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened Turkish media with reprisals if they disseminate content that damages the country’s core values.
In a notice published in the Official Gazette, he said measures were needed to protect Turkey’s “national culture” and prevent its children’s development “from being adversely affected as a result of exposure to harmful content on all written, verbal and visual media”.
Erdogan did not specify what such content was, but said legal action would be taken against “overt or covert activities through the media aimed at undermining our national and moral values and disrupting our family and social structure”.
Turkey’s leader has been in power for nearly 20 years and has often criticized media content that is out of step with values espoused by his AK Party.
Turkey has in recent years also moved to increase media oversight, with about 90 percent of major media now owned by the state or close to the government.
The RTUK radio and television watchdog has sweeping oversight over all online content, which it also has the power to remove.

Statistics Chief Sacked, Justice
Minister Replaced

Erdogan has also sacked the head of the country’s statistics agency, according to a decree published on Saturday, after annual inflation figures angered both the pro-government and opposition camps.
Sait Erdal Dincer, head of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK), came under fire after releasing data this month that put the annual inflation rate at a 19-year high of 36.1 percent.
The opposition said the figure was underreported, claiming that the real cost of living increases was at least twice as high.
But Erdogan reportedly criticised the statistics agency in private for publishing data that he felt overstated the scale of Turkey’s economic malaise, AFP reported.
Erdogan also appointed a new justice minister, naming former deputy prime minister Bekir Bozdag to replace veteran ruling party member Abdulhamit Gul.
“I have resigned from my duties at the ministry of justice, which I have been serving since 19 July 2017,” Gul wrote on Twitter.