In Deadline anthropologist Robert Samet offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of the role of the press in weaving the fabric of political culture through crime journalism in Venezuela. Urban crime in Venezuela is alarming: one in every 200 Venezuelans die in gun violence-related circumstances. Public responses to crime from Venezuelan citizens oscillate between acts of defiance and anti-crime protests. State responses to crime have shifted from rooting out the economic inequalities that enabled violent crime to emerge in the first place, to overreliance on repressive policing to crack down on urban crime. The crime press has been a major actor in shaping both spheres, amid the bitter political polarisation. The exploration of these relationships between collective mobilisation, urban security policies and the press are the guiding ideas that ground Deadline's analysis.
The author immersed himself in the world of crime news for seven years (2007–14), which allowed him to document extreme changes in both the media environment and the state's approach to public security. Samet shows that under Chavismo the media was still a diverse field where political wars were waged between pro- and anti-government agendas and the question of violent crime was addressed through policies of rehabilitation, whereas Madurismo espoused the brutal iron fist or ‘mano dura’ to curb violent crime, overwhelmingly affecting the popular classes while stymieing the press.
Samet argues that populism – an elusive concept – is a political practice that comes in different forms, at different moments, and draws on multiple possibilities to emerge. He adds to the conversation on global populism from a Latin American perspective, a region where populism is a concept that has been used – and abused – to explain its complicated political landscape. In the author's exploration of populism, neither charisma nor populist leaders are the starting point of the analysis but, instead, media practices provide explanations to understand the rise of populism from the bottom up. Using the case of Venezuela, Samet proposes the argument that while populism does not necessarily erode democracy, in Venezuela it has emerged as a political praxis yoked to grievances about deadly violence, and the press has been crucial in fanning populism. Samet demonstrates how crime journalists’ practices of denuncias, or public denunciations, from grieving relatives of crime victims articulate a collective political identity in Venezuela. They reflect on ‘the will of security’, a concept that Samet presents to explain how popular will is articulated to and ‘coalesces around demands for protection, punishment and social order’ (p. 167). The author explores how crime journalists, photographers and editors understand and make use of emotionally charged representations of urban violence to shape popular opinion and harness populist mobilisations.
The book is divided into eight chapters. In the introduction, Samet lays out the theoretical groundwork that connects populism, media and popular culture from the ground up. Chapter 1 contextualises urban security politics under the presidency of Hugo Chávez while Chapters 2 and 3 unpack the intertwined links between the press narrative of barrios as spaces ridden with criminality, while explaining how popular classes and poor neighbourhoods were pillars of the political project of Chavismo. Chapter 4 provides an arresting picture of how hierarchies of representations of crime victims by the press are appraised at the intersections of race, class status and sexuality and ultimately filtered out into Venezuela's politically polarised landscape. Although victimhood is produced through heterogeneous representations, Samet unpacks how the private press mobilises the symbol par excellence of the victim: upper-middle-class Whiteness. Those not included in victimhood are rendered disposable: the young dark-skinned male from the poor neighbourhood, the dark-skinned migrant, the poor, the queer, etc. While this is a fascinating chapter I wished the author had charted this discussion with historical details of the assumption of presumed criminality of dark skin by the press. Chapter 5 zooms in on the world of journalism and how political polarisation is entangled with news coverage, while Chapters 6 and 7 flesh out his conceptual interventions of denuncias showing the tensions permeating crime reporting in the polarised political landscape, serving as ammunition for the political narratives of the opposition or the government. Chapter 8 is theoretically rich, showing how the agency of victims – especially residents from barrios – collectively pressures the state into making changes while exposing the ruptures between the government and those from whom the government draws its political support. It is in this fissure where outrage is seen outside partisan politics in moments in which ‘collective demands become a forceful expression of constituent power’ (p. 158). Overall, Deadline is an accessibly written, excellent contribution to the anthropology of populism that can also be useful to urban and political ethnographers across disciplines such as political sciences, geography, criminology and media studies, and scholars focused on Venezuela and Latin America, while it stimulates the conversation on contemporary politics and the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.
