The first online workshop on discussion of news items within the scope of Media Watch on Hate Speech project was held on November 17, 2020, with facilitation of Ebru Özdeş and Şeyma Özkan from the Project. 

Workshop was held with the contributions of Friedrich Naumann Foundation and with the participation of individuals from different segments of the society. The participants of the workshop were chosen among the applicants of the open call by the Foundation.

After the introduction, project coordinator Şeyma Özkan made a presentation about the Media Watch on Hate Speech Project and the hate speech monitoring. How the monitoring is made, the key elements of methodology and the fundaments of conceptual position of the Project. With the presentation, the group made a general introduction to the concepts of discriminatory discourse and hate speech. Additionally, the function of the media in society was underlined and the ways in which the news produce, legitimize and re-circulate hate speech and discriminatory discourse were discussed. Şeyma Özkan shared general observations of the Project about the media’s discourse and how inciting news items reinforces discrimination against disadvantaged groups. 

In the second part, the group started to discussion on the news items pre-selected by project team. All the group together read and discuss the discourse of news, with various perspectives and from different angles. In this section, the group underlined the layers of discrimination on the discourse of news items and specified the problems and needs in the journalism that produces such news. 

After 10 minutes break, the group re-collected, and a joint discussion started for creating an alternative pluralistic discourse. With facilitation of Ebru Özdes, the group analysed the content of a particular news item and discussed what could have been done with the content. Then all together, the group created an alternative news item which is free from hate speech, misrepresentation, disinformation and which have a right-based perspective. 

Finally in the last section of the workshop, the group carried the discussion to a wider frame and tried to think about the layers of discrimination that is filtered in our daily discourses. With facilitation of Ebru Özdeş and Şeyma Özkan, the group discuss the discourse of proverbs and idioms frequently used in Turkish language.