Police say about 50 people beat an unnamed foreign national to death in central Durban on October 22, after two men broke away from a marching group. CNN’s headline gives the act to “tensions”. CNN’s headline has one person in it, and he only has things done to him. The words “beaten to death” have no one beating. The march appears as a clock, “during”, and the cause is a mood, “tensions”, that flares on its own. Police said two men broke away from a marching group on Dr Pixley kaSeme Street at about 7am Thursday and about 50 people assaulted the man. That sentence has a subject. The headline’s device is the act with no actor: the victim stays, the doers go. The frame picks the feeling. The BBC wrote “Crowd of 50 beats foreigner” 34 minutes later, and a reader sees hands. With “tensions flare”, a reader sees weather: sad, distant, nobody’s. Breitbart and TRT World also put a mob in the subject. GroundUp’s headline is passive too, but the line beneath it reads “50 people murdered the man in broad daylight on Thursday morning”. The tell to carry: when a sentence has a victim and no doer, ask who its subject would have been. The power in that street was 50 people against one man, whose name and country police have not given. When the crowd becomes a tension, no one in it has to appear, and neither does the question of who was meant to stop it. A security guard told GroundUp that vigilante groups had terrorised shop owners and residents for weeks while police were hardly visible. A mood cannot be charged; 50 people can. Police have opened a murder case and report no arrest.
