Johannesburg - As the Shrien Dewani murder trial hits full throttle this week with more salacious details expected to emerge in court, media coverage and public conversations about the British murder suspect are expected to drop off significantly.
It’s certainly not because the case is boring. Indeed, the mystery behind the motive for Anni Dewani’s honeymoon murder is a captivating one, and Shrien has become the subject of intense public scrutiny over the years.
But in terms of talkability and worldwide reach, the case seems to pale in comparison to Oscar Pistorius’s trial.
Media and social media monitoring company, ROI Africa, has been keeping a keen eye on both cases, and has noticed that the Dewani matter is so far unable to compete with the daunting amount of online content dedicated to the Paralympian.
Dewani’s trial began last week and, according to ROI Africa’s managing director Tonya Khoury, an average of 12 000 unique items are posted online about the trial on any given day.
This is combined news pieces, social media posts and any other online activity linked to the case, as searched through 200 million online platforms. Twelve thousand sounds like a respectable number, despite the wide search area, but on even the most uneventful days during Pistorius’s murder trial, the athlete would accrue upwards of 22 000 items every hour.
At the peak of the social media frenzy of Pistorius’s trial, the day of the culpable homicide verdict, more than 80 000 items appeared in a single hour.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if (at the time of sentencing), this number would be surpassed,” said Khoury.
Media coverage of Dewani’s case has been lukewarm, with numerous newspapers opting to place the Brit on inside pages for most of the proceedings, especially in Gauteng.
Khoury noted that the coverage for Dewani was stronger in Cape Town, and that Anni Dewani’s name came up significantly more often on social media than her husband’s, in comparison to Reeva Steenkamp’s importance next to Pistorius.
South Africa is also producing the most content on the Dewani trial, followed by the UK and at a distant third, India. Meanwhile, the US seems obsessed with covering Pistorius’s trial, with South Africans placing much lower on the content production side.
The Dewani trial seems all but guaranteed to be rife with sensationalism, with a bisexual husband suspected of hiring local thugs to murder his beautiful new wife.
It’s arguably a more important case for South Africa’s reputation, with the foreign perception being altered to believe that hitmen can be found in a taxi for the right price.
But perhaps because it doesn’t “star” a world-renowned athlete and his beautiful blonde, Caucasian girlfriend, it hasn’t captured the same degree of world attention.
Khoury thinks it’s more simple than that.
“I believe the lack of coverage in comparison to the Pistorius trial is largely due to the fact that the trial isn’t being televised,” she said.
Pistorius’s entire case was broadcast internationally, in what was deemed a revolutionary decision.
Khoury also guesses the lack of social media conversation could be because there are fewer Twitter celebrities live-tweeting the case. International journalists with hundreds of thousands of followers, and local journalists like Barry Bateman, who became Twitter superstars almost overnight, are following the Pistorius matter, triggering further conversation online.
This week, Pistorius’s legal team will argue the mitigating circumstances in the athlete’s case, trying to reduce a potential 15-year sentence he faces for the culpable homicide conviction.
Whether we’ll know by the end of the week if Pistorius will serve any jail time, conversations around the athlete will continue to dominate, at least ahead of other similarly important court cases.
Sunday Independent