Hate speech in local media: representation of Syrian refugees in local press of Kilis

In 2011, after the clashes and civil war in Syria, Turkey has started to receive mass migration together with other neighbouring countries. Within seven years around three and a half million citizens of the Syrian Arab Republic have arrived in Turkey. Since stability in the region would not be implemented for many years, it is considered that the majority of asylum seekers will try to settle in Turkey. The social acceptance will be achieved by the government regulations and individual experiences, but the role of media is crucial. Media is an important element to set a social perception and it is the most effective tool in production and dissemination of hate speech. Hate speech is inciting, promoting, or legitimizing forms of racial hatred, xenophobia, or other forms of hatred based on intolerance, including religious intolerance and it finds expression in the form of aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism, discrimination and enmity toward minorities, immigrants and people of immigrant backgrounds. Asylum seekers are one of the groups that are in the target of this discourse. In closed texts such as newspapers such discourses appear more implicitly under the name of journalistic principles that provide objectivity. Crime news, report a lot about criminal and victim identities under their 'ordinary' work, such as conveying actual judicial incidents. On the other hand, asylum seekers are mostly the subject of crime news. For this reason, hate speech directed to the asylum-seekers has been investigated in the context of crime news. The proximity of the possible hate speech producers to the asylum seekers makes the possible hate speech of the local press important. In this study content and discourse analysis method is applied to published issues of Kilis newspapers Hududeli and Kent from August 2016 to July 2017. Kilis province is selected for this study because Kilis hosts more asylum seekers with respect to its own Turkish population than any other province in Turkey. This study which is based on the hypothesis that there is hate speech in the local media provides evidences that both newspapers contain racial discourse by implicitly using discriminatory language against the asylum seekers, therefore creating hate speech.