Abstract:

Since 2011, more then 2 million refugees took refuge in Turkey and most of them settled in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Since then, Turkish academics have paid significant attention to how the refugees are represented in the national and local media, assuming that the media representations will have a determining effect on the Turkish citizens’ reception of their new neighbours. These studies which were mainly content and discourse analysis, found out that the Turkish media permeates attitudes that are discriminatory and excluding, if not racist. However, there was no evidence how this media content is reflected in individual perceptions on Syrian refugees. Based on integrated framework analysis, this study aims to find out if media messages can remarkably effect values, perceptions, evaluations and attitudes by taking the Syrian refugee issue as an examplary case. We applied a Likert scale based questionnaire to compare the attitudes of test and control group. Test group took the questionaire after watching a 90 seconds long “Most Shocking Second A Day” video created by Don’t Panic London for Save The Children UK. The video, which was based on images rather than words, aims to raise awareness on the effects of the Syrian civil war on its third anniversary. The attitudes of the university students who watched the video for the first time were significantly more tolerant and symphatetic towards the problems of refugees than those do did the questionnaire without watching it. Our research showed that media messages can be demonstrated by empirical research more solidly. Our research indicated the effects of the media messages and pointed to the need of more social advertising endeavours in order to fight the existing discourse of discrimination.

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