Hayat Gorsel is a media company that owns three television channels, one radio station and three websites. The company had operated as Yeni Pasifik İnşaat Sanayi ve Ticaret until 2008 when it changed the name to the current one.
Media assets
Television: Kanal 7, Kanal 7 Avrupa, Ulke TV
Radio: Radyo 7
News portal: Haber7, Izle7, Yasemin
State Media Matrix Typology: Captured Private (CaPr)
Ownership and governance
The company is co-owned by four shareholders, each with a 25% stake in it: Zekeriya Karaman, İsmail Karahan, Mustafa Çelik and Zahid Akman. The four co-owners did jail time in the early 2010s for their involvement in an embezzlement scheme. In 2015, charges against them were dropped.
President Erdoğan has close links with some of Hayat Gorsel’s owners. Zekeriya Karaman’s sister-in-law is married to Erdoğan’s son Burak. The daughter of another shareholder in Hayat Gorsel, Mustafa Çelik, was elected an AKP MP in 2015.
Source of funding and budget
There is no publicly available information about the financial performance of Hayat Gorsel. Local journalists know of state advertising contracts awarded to the media owned by the group; however, they can’t estimate whether state funding accounts for half of the company’s turnover. Hayat Gorsel’s media also generate important revenues through contracts for advertising sales with private companies.
Editorial independence
The media outlets controlled by Hayat Gorsel are known to be openly supportive of the government and president Erdoğan. That is mostly a result of the close links between the group’s owners and the President, according to information from local journalists and activists.
There is no statute and no independent assessment/oversight mechanism that would validate the independence of Hayat Gorsel’s media outlets.
October 2023