Our people’s work: Dr Sisanda Nkoala’s ‘Persuasion and the Mediatisation of Culture’
In this series, we highlight the publications, work and research of the Press Council’s staff, members and adjudicators.
Dr Sisanda Bukeka Nkoala, who is an Associate Professor at the University of the Western Cape, is a public representative on the Adjudication Panel.
This is the abstract for her PhD, earned at the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, in October 2021. Dr Nkoala’s supervisor was Distinguished Professor Philippe-Joseph Salazar of the Department of Private Law at the Centre for Rhetoric Studies.
Persuasion and the ‘Mediatisation’ of Culture: A Rhetorical Criticism of South African Television News Reports on Crime and the Criminal Justice System
This study undertakes a rhetorical analysis of South African television news reports on the criminal justice system.
The aim is to build on the existing rhetoric culture theory by considering the persuasive communicative work performed through the mediatisation of a cultural system.
The overarching issues that the study sets out to explore are the persuasive communicative work being performed by South African television news reports on crime and justice and how these reports frame or represent crime, justice, and the criminal justice system in this persuasive communication work. It also analyses the rhetorical strategies and devices employed in these reports.
This qualitative study was undertaken using elements of grounded theory methodology and elements of the case study method. The analysis was undertaken on 90 days of prime time news bulletins from SABC and eTV, aired in 2019 and 2020.
The Burkean notion of language as symbolic action is the framework that informs this study. The study also draws on Metz’s notions on film semiotics and Walton’s concept of persuasive argumentation scheme.
In critiquing how South African television news reports re-present crime, justice, and the criminal justice system in doing persuasive communicative work and the rhetorical strategies and devices they employ, the study discusses contextual framing as the key strategy employed, and amplification as the most notable rhetorical device.
It also highlights that the criminal justice system is virtually ignored
in these reports. Instead, the focus is on elements of the system, such as the people, the procedures, and the places. In considering these elements, what emerges is a system whose focus changes from year to year depending on what is topical; a system where women are the primary and secondary victims of crime, and men are active agents both in terms of how they are depicted as criminals and how they are featured as the ones with the solutions to the crime problem; a system that operates in urban areas; and a system whose most important player is the police minister.
The study finds that South African television news reports’ mediatisation of the criminal justice system employs framing to ensure that the viewer is inclined to interpret the developments being reported on from the journalist’s perspective
It also relies on amplification as a rhetorical device that makes salient those aspects that the reporter deems significant to make them stand out to the audience.
In the present age where most people’s exposure to the justice system is through the mediated experience of watching something about, through the analysis undertaken, the study has theorised that to understand a televised cultural system, we must consider how television frames that system and the aspects of the system that it amplifies as a medium.
