Diego Cupolo reports: Earlier this month, as he watched crew workers dismantle his television studio, Barış Barıştıran, chief broadcasting manager at Özgür Gün TV, told me that running a Kurdish news channel has never been easy in Turkey — but it’s never been this hard.

“In the 1990s, they would bomb our building, they would harass us, but they wouldn’t shut down our channel,” he said. “We would get punished and that was it.”

A week earlier, Barıştıran received a text message from the station’s satellite service provider saying they would stop broadcasting Özgür Gün TV, downgrading the channel from a national network to a local station reliant on landlines. With the station’s audience now diminished, advertisers dropped their contracts, and Baristiran, no longer able to afford the rent on the TV studio, was forced to move operations to another location.

“They told us thirty minutes before cutting the satellite service,” he said. “It was purely a political decision coming from above.”

Özgür Gün TV has been broadcasting from Diyarbakır, Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city, in one form or another since 1995. As with all other Kurdish media in the country, the station has long confronted obstacles in its coverage. It’s been penalized for broadcasting interviews with Kurdish politicians, and had its websites and social media accounts blocked repeatedly by telecommunications authorities.

In October 2015, a plainclothes police officer put a gun to the head of one of its reporters while he was covering military operations in the southeastern city of Silvan. This too was nothing new for Kurdish journalists. What mattered was that the TV crew was able to continue broadcasting afterwards.

“As you see, that’s not the case anymore,” Barıştıran said, as workers laid down a world map printed on composite board that, moments earlier, had served as the backdrop for the news studio. [Continue reading…]