ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the content of the Potchefstroom Herald as a security infrastructure during the period from January 2018 to December 2019. It discusses the nature of the reporting to understand how crime, criminals and public and private crime fighting institutions are portrayed. Manifest coding reveals that the newspaper relies disproportionately on crime and its distinct entanglement with discourses of state failure to fill its pages. Although there is much crime, this type of approach to journalism is potentially harmful, as it fuels large-scale panic and discontent with the police and other public institutions. Significantly, such reporting may also perpetuate dichotomous identity formations, based on equivalences associated with an ‘onslaught’ from an approximated other. Based on Lacanian psychoanalysis the chapter argues that many white Afrikaans speaking residents of Potchefstroom are not located in a symbolic order amenable to constructive dialogue towards the radical and plural democracy advocated by Laclau and Mouffe. The chapter proposes other ways of viewing the problem of crime in order to devise progressive hegemonic re-articulation.
