“Reception of racist-discriminative media discourse”

Racist/discriminatory discourse put into circulation via mass media are generated upon the definition of the Other on the basis of stereotypes and the presentation of gender, race and ethnicity representations within a similar framework. Furthermore, regeneration and dissemination of racism is also mediated by the media suppressing and marginalizing the alternatives working against it and thereby creating an influence to this effect on other social groups and social beliefs.   

In spite of this role of the media, the receiver of media messages cannot be argued to accept all messages as they are or to limit themselves with the “dominant reading”. Therefore, research is of great importance in how ideological representations presented through the media are perceived, interpreted, recreated and used by individuals in daily life. 

The manner in which racist discourse or racism presented within media texts discuss, generate and generalize racism and how these texts are read by the audience emerge as a significant societal problem also in Turkey.

To this end, this study will perform a reception analysis for the purpose of  revealing the forms of “reading” racist media content used by university students as a sample for the “interpretative community”. The texts to be used as intermediaries within the reception study are planned to be selected from media in general and from television texts in particular.

This dissertation study aims to establish the relationship between the meaning generated by the media texts mediating verbal, audio and visual coding in the generation and generalization of racist/discriminatory opinions and judgments in Turkey and the meaning regenerated by the audience.