Within the scope of Media Watch on Hate Speech, the recent data of the monitoring of national and local newspapers in Turkey showed that there is an increase in the number of instances of hate speech especially towards Syrian refugees. Starting from this finding, thematic subject of the discriminatory discourse report covering the September - December 2014 period is based on discrimination in print media towards the Syrian refugees. This report addressing the discriminatory and exclusionary discourse in the news and opinion columns covering the Syrian refugees in Turkey who have to leave their country because of the ongoing internal conflicts in Syria has been published in June 2015.
With the Friedrich Naumann Foundation’s support, the workshop entitled ‘Refugees in Media and Contradictions in Concepts’ held in Hrant Dink Foundation Anarad Hığutyun Building on Thursday, July 2 aimed to share the findings of the report and to give information about the concepts related to asylum in the media.
With the contributions of Hakan Ataman from Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly and also the writer of the report entitled 'Discriminatory Discourse towards Syrian Refugees in Local and National Media', and Eda Bekçi from Association for Solidarity with Refugees (Multeci-Der), the discriminatory discourse towards refugees in the media and the concepts related to asylum were discussed in the workshop.
The first contributor of the workshop Eda Bekçi discussed the concepts related to asylum on the basis of the guide book of Multeci-Der entitled 5N 1 Mülteci published in 2010 to assist media employees for proper terminology, information and approach during the news-making process. As legislative regulations have changed in Turkey and in the world since the year 2010, Bekçi underlined the fact that this guide book has not updated. Further she explained the national and international meanings of asylum-seeker, immigrant, illegal immigrant which are confused with the concept of refugee.
In her presentation Bekçi gave place to asylum law and further gave information about the international conventions signed by Turkey and the rights of refugees designated in Turkish domestic legal order.
Hakan Ataman, after the presentation of Eda Bekçi, presented the discriminatory discourse towards Syrian refugees in the media and the findings of the report with examples from news and opinion columns. The findings of the instances of discriminatory discourse related to Syrian refugees included directly or indirectly in the news and opinion columns were presented in three main titles:
- The lack of rights-based perspective
- The perspective based on security concerns
- The social construction of news and the discriminative role of media
