Abstract

This paper examines the performance of local identities on Talk Radio 702’s online news platform, Eyewitness News. It identifies surveillance and the mediation of ‘new’ South African identities as major tropes in the production of content made available on this ‘news brand’. Using discourse analysis, the study draws on the content of Eyewitness News to make a sense of how radio deploys its ubiquity in the performance of present day South African identities. The paper argues that the deployment of performance and orality through the traditional phenomenon of ‘witnessing’ appears to provide the impetus for the creation and sustenance of this form of mediation in the first instance. It concludes that the domestication of a global form of mediation to speak to an identified urban niche audience has made Eyewitness News a crucial platform for public experiences which mirror local realities in South Africa.

Keywords: Orality; Eyewitness News; Performance; South Africa; Identities.

*    Jendele Hungbo (Ph.D., Wits) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mass Communication, Bowen University, Iwo, Nigeria

© ^AMCRON Journal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 11, No. 1, April 2019, pp. 66 – 72