"Yaşam Durduğunda" : ölüm haberleri üzerine bir analiz

This thesis aims to understand how news related to death is presented in the media and how discourses on death exhibit diversity within these news. In this context, the study analyses how media discourses on death reflect social dynamics and how these discourses reproduce inequality and discrimination through discourse. It argues that media discourse, beyond shaping/manipulating public opinion, behaviour, and ideologies, is related to norms, social structures, and various forms of power within specific social practices. The purpose of this thesis is to conduct an in-depth discursive analysis of the role of discourses surrounding death-related news in processes of social exclusion and how these processes are reflected in the media. This thesis employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) both theoretically and methodologically to examine how media discourses reflect and can reproduce social power relations and inequalities. CDA views discourse as a social practice shaped and constituted by power relations and social structures and critically examines how social inequalities are expressed, constructed, and legitimized through language use. All death-related news from the selected period was examined, but news containing explicit or implicit discrimination was analysed using CDA. At this point, since CDA emphasizes revealing the power relations and ideologies embedded in implicit expressions, news containing more covert forms of discriminatory discourse was analysed in-depth. These analyses demonstrate that the way death-related news is presented in the media reflects social exclusion and consequently reproduces emerging inequalities through discourse.