Cenk Kadir Uygur (born March 21, 1970) is a Turkish-American left-wing political activist, commentator, and media host. He is the co-creator of The Young Turks, a progressive and a left-wing populist sociopolitical news and commentary program.
Born in Istanbul, Uygur moved to the US in 1978 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. After a brief law practice in 1996, he hosted talk shows for WRKO, WWRC, and WAMI-TV before launching The Young Turks in 2002. Uygur briefly worked as a political commentator for MSNBC in 2011, and appeared on a weeknight commentary show on Current TV from 2011 to 2013. He founded the progressive political action committees Wolf-PAC, Justice Democrats, and Rebellion PAC.
In 2020, Uygur unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat in the special election and the regularly scheduled election for California's 25th congressional district on a platform that advocated for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and overturning Citizens United v. FEC. In October 2023, Uygur announced he would run in the 2024 Democratic Party presidential primaries to pressure then-President Joe Biden to withdraw from the election, despite not being a natural-born US citizen as constitutionally required; he suspended his campaign in March 2024.
Uygur is critical of the modern Democratic Party, which he accuses of elitism and straying from populist ideals. He has worked to move the party in a more social democratic or democratic socialist direction. Uygur advocates for campaign finance reform and is highly critical of US support for Israel. He has generated controversy for making offensive comments about women and minority groups, including LGBTQ people, religious Jews, and Muslims, and denying the Armenian genocide during his education; he has apologized for and retracted these remarks.
Cenk Kadir Uygur was born in Istanbul to a wealthy Turkish family. His mother's maiden name was Yavaşça, and his father, Doğan, started life as a rural olive and grape farmer in Kilis, a city in southern Turkey near the Syrian border, later winning a scholarship to a technical university in Istanbul, becoming a mechanical engineer, and starting a company. The family emigrated to the United States when Cenk was eight years old, and there Doğan worked as a commercial real estate developer. He spent the remainder of his upbringing in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and graduated from East Brunswick High School. Uygur was raised in a secular Muslim household, but became more religious during college. He says that he then became agnostic, and is now a "stone-cold atheist", although he still identifies as a cultural Muslim.
Although a D in high school calculus almost kept Uygur out, he transferred into the undergraduate Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in management and graduated in 1992. There, he wrote a school paper column in 1991 in which he criticized affirmative action for blacks and other minorities. He also criticized campus feminists for "making Anita Hill their patron saint" and made disparaging comments about women and said that the discussion about rape on campus was making men afraid.
Representing the Turkish Students Association on the university's Student Activities Council, Uygur argued against a $228 allocation to the Armenian Club in the council budget; council members overwhelmingly voted against him, and uncharacteristically applauded after his defeat was announced. In November 1991, he wrote an article in The Daily Pennsylvanian titled "Historical Fact or Falsehood?", in which he denied the Armenian genocide and asserted: "The claims of an Armenian genocide are not based on historical facts. If the history of the period is examined it becomes evident that in fact no such genocide took place." He has since recanted these statements and reversed his position. He received a Juris Doctor Law degree from Columbia Law School.
Uygur worked briefly in 1996 as an associate attorney. He practiced first at the law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath in Washington, D.C., and then at Hayes & Liebman in New York City.
He then worked in 1996 as a weekend/fill-in radio talk show host on WRKO in Boston, Massachusetts, and also that year in a similar position on WWRC in Washington, D.C. He bought time on a local access channel in Washington, D.C., where he made political commentary on his show called The Young Turk.
In 1999, he wrote for, produced, and appeared on a WAMI-TV news show, The Times in Miami, Florida. He then started The Young Turks (TYT) on Sirius Satellite Radio. That year, Uygur wrote on a blog post on the TYT website: "It seems like there is a sea of tits here, and I am drinking in tiny droplets. Obviously, the genes of women are flawed. They are poorly designed creatures who do not want to have sex nearly as often as needed for the human race to get along peaceably and fruitfully." He also wrote, in a letter to the editor in Salon, that talk of an Armenian genocide was simply propaganda. In the 2000s, Uygur maintained a weekly blog on The Huffington Post and wrote entries that were critical of the 2003 Iraq war.
Uygur created the left-wing, progressive talk show The Young Turks with the goal of starting a liberal-leaning political and entertainment show. It launched on the Sirius Satellite Radio network on February 14, 2002, and was also on the Air America radio network between 2006 and 2008. Uygur and his co-host Ana Kasparian applied a populist-left branding and programming strategy that made TYT a global online organization.
Armenian-Americans have criticized the show's name because the original Young Turks political movement in the Ottoman Empire was responsible for the Armenian genocide. Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said of Uygur and the show's name: Denying a genocide, belittling its survivors, and then naming your political show after its perpetrators should be troubling not only to Armenian Americans, but anyone concerned about human rights. Cenk Uygur... did just this ....The Young Turks began a daily news video show on YouTube in 2005, and claims to have been the first on the streaming service. Uygur regularly says that The Young Turks is the largest online news show in the world, and has claimed so since at least 2011. It has amassed over 5 billion views on YouTube, and over 5 million subscribers, for a U.S. rank of #5,566. Leveraging the strength of The Young Turks talk show, Uygur expanded it into a network of channels and shows, beginning with Pop Trigger on July 5, 2007. Video of the show is streamed daily on its website, as well as on YouTube, YouTubeTV, via various streaming platforms, broadcast on a handful of local television channels throughout the U.S., and is a podcast.
In September 2011, when Uygur had been seeking a television platform for The Young Turks for years, a weeknight TV edition of the show was announced on fledgling Current TV, which had low ratings, at 7 p.m. EST (M–F) on the network beginning sometime in the fourth quarter of 2011. The show on Current TV began in December 2011, to low viewership, and ended on August 15, 2013, with the end of all live programming on Current TV.
In 2015, Uygur hosted ex-Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist neo-Nazi David Duke on the show in an antisemitic segment about "how Jews control everything." Cenk stated on the Lex Friedman show in 2024 he was arguing against David Duke's views. In 2019, he tweeted that Evangelical Christians harbored the worst antisemitism in the world.
In May 2018, The Young Turks launched its own TV-format 24-hour channel on YouTube TV, which includes both live and prerecorded programming.
Uygur hired his nephew, Hasan Piker, to work for the show.
MSNBC hired Uygur as a contributor and substitute anchor for the network on October 21, 2010. On January 21, 2011, Uygur was appointed as the host of the 6 p.m. Eastern slot on MSNBC as the anchor of a new prime time edition of MSNBC Live, resulting in a rearrangement of the time slots of MSNBC's other prime time shows. Uygur filled the time slot for six months, from January through June 2011.