Slightly Above the Syrian Refugees: Media Representation of Street Vendors in Turkey

Abstract

Does the media through its news convey us their categorisation, have particular lexical choices, give less space or voice to the actors regarding the news that mentioned street vendors in Turkey? The research question of this study is that whether or not the print media covers street vendors in their news? What is the tone of these news articles? In which pages do they cover? What are the news themes related with street vendors and who are the main actors in this news? This chapter presents a systematic study of 100 news articles which were published between 2016 and 2018 in Turkey’s mainstream, popular newspaper Hürriyet. The 100 news which included the word ‘street vendor’ in the texts were selected from the Hürriyet’s database and categorised and the content of the news articles were analysed. Findings of the of 100 news articles which mentioned ‘street vendor’ were researched and analysed totally. The analysis already reveals that the word choice of the news articles regarding street vendors are often conflict stories between the vendors and municipality police forces namely ‘Zabıta’ in Turkey. In sum, there were 19 news articles that referred street vendors with positive tone and wording, but 68 news articles still depicted street vendors in negative framing and use negative attribution in the text of the news. Totally 16 news articles included by-line and the rest of the 84 news articles did not include the journalist’s name and were covered as anonym. Out of the 100 news articles only a handful focussed on the advocacy and rights of street vendors.

Citation

Toker, H. (2020), "Slightly Above the Syrian Refugees: Media Representation of Street Vendors in Turkey", Grima, S., Sirkeci, O. and Elbeyoğlu, K. (Ed.) Global Street Economy and Micro Entrepreneurship (Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis, Vol. 103), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 63-73. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1569-375920200000103010