π§Listen Now
Reha Muhtar, who died June 3 at the age of 66, was a television phenomenon of the 1990s β he swept through that decade like a force of nature.
Almost all of Turkey knew his name. He introduced a style of broadcasting and journalism that was colorful, tabloid-tinged, and altogether different from the stiff official tradition it was pushing back against. He listened to the street β or at least managed to keep his finger on its pulse β though he never shied away from a flair for the dramatic. In that era, he and his formidable rivals began anchoring the main evening news, earning themselves a new title: anchorman. Muhtar was at the center of a ferocious ratings war.
REPORTING FROM ATHENS
In the beginning, in the 1980s, Muhtar followed a conventional journalistic path. He worked as a diplomatic correspondent and became TRT's reporter in Greece β the single-channel state broadcaster's man on the ground, filing dispatches from Athens. Then the 1990s arrived, and with them the era of private television channels. This upended TRT's image β and reality β as the government's loyal mouthpiece, leaving the broadcaster scrambling for a way forward. It was in this period that Muhtar launched AteΕ HattΔ± (Line of Fire), a program that brought together spokespeople and representatives from opposing political and social camps and, as the title suggested, let them clash on air. When the show became a hit, Muhtar took it with him as he moved to the private channels.
He then stepped into the television wars as a main news anchor. Muhtar held his place in the media landscape into the 2000s, even as the fires of the nineties began to cool β but eventually he faded from the front lines, slipping from the memory of younger generations. He later passed away after a prolonged struggle with serious illness.
MUHTAR, AS AHMET KAYA WAS BEING LYNCHED
Any portrait of Reha Muhtar must be reckoned with Ahmet Kaya. On Feb. 10, 1999, at the Entertainment Journalists Association gala, the Kurdish singer Ahmet Kaya announced that he intended to record a song in Kurdish β and was met with cutlery hurled at him by the crowd, in what amounted to a public lynching. Kaya left for Paris shortly afterward, an exile in all but name, and died there not long after.
Muhtar was among those who joined the chorus against Kaya that night. In his own defense, he later claimed he had not insulted Kaya β that the atmosphere was fraught, and that he had called on the crowd to sing βMemleketimβ (My Homeland - A nationalist song) in an attempt to defuse the tension. But the image of him that night never quite left the public memory.
DOES IT HURT? DOES IT HURT?
During his years as a news anchor, Muhtar became known for asking questions that no one else would. The most infamous: approaching someone who had just been in an accident and asking them, in person, 'Does it hurt? Does it hurt?'
Were he anchoring today, and were he to put that same question to the CHP figures parading across screens from one crisis to the next, no one would be the least bit surprised.
