and August 2012, according to a recent report from the Hrant Dink Foundation, released on Thursday.The Hrant Dink Foundation regularly monitors the media for stories that target religious and ethnic minorities, or other disadvantaged groups such as the disabled or non-heterosexual individuals. Between August and May this year, there were 101 op-ed columns and news articles identified by the foundation’s experts as targeting national, ethnic and religious groups. There were 35 items targeting women and individuals with sexual orientations that differ from the general population.
The report found that the number of groups targeted went down to 15 communities from 17 in the first two reports. The majority of the content that contains hate speech was from the national press, the report found. Some 82 percent of items classified as containing hate speech, was found in national media. The remaining 18 percent came from local newspapers. Also, the report found that the majority of hate speech is disseminated in the work of columnists.
In the period between May-August, the groups that were targeted most often were, respectively, Armenians, Christians, Jews and Greeks, the report said. It noted, “Out of this group, the aspect that stood out the most in terms of hate speech towards Armenians, which we may identify as a fixed category, was their association with the [terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party] PKK within the context of the recently intensifying conflict. This discourse, produced through an understanding that “Muslim Kurds are harmless and the PKK is an Armenian movement,” was also seen to be reproduced at times with content targeting Christians and Jews. However, the most dominant assertion was that of Armenians supporting the PKK, looking for opportunities to harm Turkey, the “eternal enemy,” and being a risk factor.”
The report also found that the number of stories and columns using hate speech against Kurds is increasing. “This increase was observed to coincide with the months of July and August, when armed conflict intensified, and the Kurdish people were noted as having been charged within the context of the clashes with the PKK. In this kind of content, the issue was reduced to “Kurdish terror,” either implying that “patience was running thin” or creating enmity by attributing the issue to the Kurdish people.”
In addition to religious or ethnic minorities, the report found 35 items that employed hate speech directed at the Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender (LBGT) community. In addition, the report says the Turkish press in its representations of transvestites and transsexuals associates these individuals with “crime” and “social unrest.”
The report said newspapers that gave the most space to hate speech in the May-August period, not unlike in previous periods, were those with a nationalist-conservative editorial line, with Milli Gazete, Yeni Akit, Ortadoğu, Yeniçağ and Yeni Mesaj newspapers once again being the publications with the most frequent occurrences of hate speech.
The Hrant Dink Foundation has been monitoring the media for hate speech since 2009. It says its main purpose is to combat racism, discrimination and intolerance in Turkey. The foundation monitored approximately 1,000 local newspapers and all national newspapers through the Media Monitoring Center using various key strings (such as collaborator, Turcophobe, separatist etc.). In addition to the keyword alerts, 16 newspapers, chosen in line with their circulation volume, are read and manually monitored as part of the foundation’s hate-speech watch efforts. The news is evaluated on the basis of four categories of hate speech. The first category of “Exaggeration/attribution /distortion” involves negative stereotyping and distortion. The second category of “Blasphemy / insult / degradation,” includes the direct use of denigrating or obscene words toward the targeted group. The third category, “Enmity/war discourse,” is any item that contains hostility and war-mongering expressions about a community. The fourth category, with the difficult name of “Use of inherent identity as an element of hate or humiliation / symbolization,” contains discourses where the attributes of a person acquired from birth are used to humiliate a person.