Theme:
Media Watch on Hate Speech Project was initiated by the Hrant Dink Foundation in 2009 with the aim of combatting racism, discrimination and intolerance in Turkey. Taking into account the importance of civilian oversight on the media, one of the instruments for producing and reproducing racism, discrimination and alienation, the specific goal of this study is to foster newspapers’ respect for human rights and differences, draw attention to the racist and discriminatory language used in news articles and columns and thereby raise awareness and encourage the print media to stop engaging in hateful discourse.
Within the scope of the project, we monitor national and local print media daily for racist and discriminatory language. Once we identify news stories and columns that contain such discourse we announce and expose them with synopses on our project website, www.nefretsoylemi.org and the project’s social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. In this presentation, we intend to explain the project’s aims, the methodological transformations it went through and its general conclusions as well as depicting how to identify hate speech in traditional media through case studies.