“JUST PROPORTIONALITY” AND SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE: RHETORICS OF CRIME IN THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA
“JUST PROPORTIONALITY” AND SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE: RHETORICS OF CRIME IN THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA

Summary/Abstract: Though former South African President Thabo Mbeki gained international notoriety as an AIDS-denialist, in South Africa it may be that his rhetorical responses on the topic of violent crime were as important in damaging his reputation with white citizens in particular. This article argues that there is a family resemblance between Mbeki's rhetoric of AIDS-denialism and his responses to claims that violent crime was increasing and affecting the lives of most South African citizens -- Mbeki's rhetorical responses treat social phenomena, whether a pandemic or a crime wave, primarily as constructs of a particular political view or interest if not simply as moral panics. Thus Mbeki was able to treat both claims that AIDS and violent crime were major threats to South Africa as white constructs that stemmed from racial suspicions about black South Africans and black men, in particular. An anti-rhetoric of rape, in particular, linked Mbeki's suspicion of both medical and criminal discourses. This article will explore the possibility that the dominant international intellectual models about crime not only influenced then President Mbeki's suspicion of crime coverage but, by extension, helped fuel a wider suspicion of any negative reporting. Mbeki's rhetoric on crime, however, has a rather more respectable genealogy than his rhetoric of AIDS-denialism. Influential strands of media theorising about crime hold that media exaggerate the extent of crime, particularly violent crime, demonise certain racial minorities, and produce fearful citizens. This article contends that much of this theorising is conceptually limited, even incoherent, in that it cannot account significantly for questions of under-reporting crime or compare crime coverage nationally or internationally in any coherent way. It returns to Graber’s work to draw particularly on her notion of ‘just proportionality’ to argue that this provides a benchmark for comparative, non-normative judgments of coverage on crime. The article assesses some of the difficulties of applying the notion, given problems surrounding crime statistics in South Africa and elsewhere. It draws on a significant data-base of some 400000 South African media articles (print and broadcast) for 2005 and 2006 analysed by Media Tenor South Africa. The article shows that many articles about crime coverage in the USA which have been drawn on by South African President Mbeki and others are reacting to a proportion of crime coverage that exceeds the South African case by up to 1000%. The article argues that both white and black critics of media coverage of crime provide part of the context and truth of the shortcomings of crime coverage in South Africa.

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