Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Jeffrey Bennett, committee chair; Jaye Atkinson, Marian Meyers, committee members. Electronic text (118 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed July 16, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-118).

Thesis (M.A.)--Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan L. Miller, Dept. of Sociology & Criminal Justice. Includes bibliographical references.

Research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Art (Journalism and Media Studies), Johannesburg, 2016 / Rape is a predominant crime and a social issue in South Africa today. South Africa’s incidence of rape is among the highest in the world. Identifying and understanding the dominant rape narratives in news media is useful in pinpointing how the media represents the crime of rape. It is understood through agenda-setting theory that news media plays an important role in how topics come onto the national agenda, giving news media a particular influence in society. Further, through discourse analysis and narrative theories, research has shown how what people read and hear can influence their understanding of those matters, and can drive social change or maintain the stability of social structures. Some theorists take this further, arguing that narrative fundamentally informs how humans make sense of the world, that reality is discursively constructed. The research below attempts to access, reveal and unpack these dominant narratives as they pertain to rape, using a combination of corpusbased analysis and critical discourse analysis techniques on two corpora of South African newspaper text from the first quarter of 2013, and tied to a specific case study, the rape and murder of Anene Booysen. The resultant findings also provide a snapshot of the dominant ideology and social practices in South Africa over the time period studied, as discourse and narrative are implicitly tied to power in society / GR2017

This thesis analyzes rape coverage in a Grahamstown newspaper, Grocott’s Mail. Critical discourse analysis is used to discuss and analyze articles about rape that appear in Grocott’s Mail between October 14th 2008 and October 29th 2009. Drawing on existing literature on ‘rape myths’ in media coverage of rape, this thesis argues that Grocott’s Mail perpetuates racial and gender stereotypes through the way in which it reports on rape. While not all of the articles included in the analysis use rape myths, most use one or more when discussing rape incidents. Specifically, Grocott’s Mail tends to use rape myths that blame the victim for the rape and de-emphasize the role of the perpetrator in the rape. This is problematic as it sustains existing racial and gender inequalities.

In this minithesis I conduct a critical discourse analysis to take on a double-pronged task. On the one hand I explore the social phenomenon of the contestation between supporters of then-ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma and supporters of his rape accuser. The trial, which took place in the Johannesburg High Court between mid-February and early May 2006, stirred intense public interest, both locally and internationally. The performance of thousands of Zuma’s supporters and a far smaller number of gender rights lobby groups, both of whom kept a presence outside the court building throughout the trial, received similar attention. Second, I examine how the Sowetan, a national daily tabloid with a black, middle-class readership, mediated the trial through pictures of the theatre outside the court and letters to the editor. The study is informed by post-Marxist and cultural studies perspectives, both approaches that are concerned with issues of power, ideology and the circulation of meaning within specific sociocultural contexts. A rudimentary thematic content analysis draws out some of the main themes from the material, while the critical discourse analysis is located within a theoretical framework based on concepts from Laclau & Mouffe’s theory of meaning, which assumes a power struggle between contesting positions seeking to invalidate one another and to either challenge or support existing hegemonies. This is further informed by, first, Laclau’s theorisation of populism, which assumes that diverse groupings can unite under a demagogue’s banner in shared antagonism towards existing power, and second, by concepts from Mamdani’s theorisation of power and resistance in colonial and post-colonial Africa, which explicates three overarching ideological discourses of human rights, social justice and traditional ethnic practices. The study, then, explores how these three discourses were operationalised by the localised contestations over the trial.

This study investigates Grocott’s Mail’s rape reporting through a participatory action research process. It draws on feminist cultural studies, sociology of news, and normative theories of the media to inform the research project. The participatory action research process explored three areas with the journalists at Grocott’s Mail: their understanding of the community they serve and their own professional identity as a community of practice, roles of the media in society which inform reporting, and rape as a social issue and problem. Through this process the study found that the pervasiveness of rape in the Grahamstown community, the complexities around rape reporting which include the significant legal challenges, the personal impact rape cases have on journalists, and the journalistic roles and approaches employed in rape reporting all influence how the paper covers rape. In analysing these matters the study found that the primary factor inhibiting a successful strategy for managing rape reporting was that Grocott’s Mail does not place gender-based violence on their news agenda as an issue requiring attention in order to develop the community they serve.