Turkey and Turks in the German media

Abstract

It is known that the prejudices, which have emerged in the historical process, are engraved in the social memory of the nations; conveyed from the past to the future in language, art, literature, history and many other fields; and reproduced via media especially in the periods of crisis.

Firstly, Turkish-German relations must be examined in the historical process in order to understand how Turkey and Turks are represented in the German media. Accordingly, Turkish-German relations are also important in terms of drawing a general framework on how the West, which has been preserving its topicality for centuries, sees Turkey.

How the subjects and groups are represented in the media texts and what kind of an image are formed in relation with them reveals the social memory of the countries in which the media texts are produced.

The prejudices which have emerged in the social memory of the German people in the historical process have an effect in forming the negative image of Turks by being reproduced via active media especially in the periods of crisis. A negative image of Turks is brought forward with the concepts such as human rights violations, fundamentalism, oppression against the women and the minorities, Kurdish-Turkish discrimination and Alawi-Sunni discrimination.

German media uses as evidence and tries to emphasize their justness on the publications, photographs and images that take place in the Turkish media in terms of especially the concepts mentioned above.

Media texts are dialogues which are formed between the target audience and the narrator who reflects the opinions of the authority elites that are the sources of news. For that reason, representation forms of Turkey and Turks will be associated with the historical prejudices and analyzed with the critical discourse analysis approach in the scope of this study.