Othering Through Hate Speech: The Turkish-Islamist (V)AKIT Newspaper as a Case Study

What is it about?

In heated struggles for power like election campaigns, political rivals are villainized through othering in the mass media. This is clearly the case in Turkey where society is structurally polarized along ethnic, religious, regional and political cleavages as well as sociological conflict lines between Islamists and secularists, urban (and Thracian) citizens in coastal cities and rural Anatolian villagers. The anti-Semitist (V)Akit newspaper, which attracts attention with its immoderate, militant, Sunni-Islamist discourse, used negative stereotypes in headlines and news coverage, columns, cartoons and caricatures. The daily tried to villainize its secularist rivals like Thracians and Kemalists by using inflammatory, abusive words and defamatory allegations.

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