an increasing number of journalists recognise this as well. The veteran Channel 4 journalist Jon Snow acknowledged this change explicitly, saying in a Guardian newspaper opinion piece a few days later (2015):
Journalism makes no sense to the citizen without some emotional engagement. That doesn’t mean we have to sensationalise, or struggle to be emotional in our reporting. But we do have to tell it like it is. If we deny the impact an event has upon us, we deny not only ourselves, but those who depend on us for at least some of their information.
In today’s social media world, infused by populism and fake news, the open display of emotion by journalists may still be controversial but it is no longer taboo. It is no longer a surprise; it is viewed by some members of the public as more authentic than the old ‘stiff upper lip’ model of detached journalism and it reflects a trend by which news has partly become seen as a means of entertainment. No more than 15 years ago, the reaction to Satchell’s on-air breakdown might have been different. Rosenstiel and Kovach (2005) formulated rules for the journalistic display of emotion, arguing that ‘emotion ought to come at those moments when any other reaction would have seemed forced or out of place’. This was the Cronkite school of journalism; once the crisis had passed – for example, the day after the breaking news story – normal rules of detachment and objectivity were to be resumed. Today, that is no longer always the case.
This chapter explores the ways in which the taboo over journalistic emotion has been eroded and how the boundaries between traditional forms of journalism and content on social media platforms have become blurred. It charts the rise of emotion in the populist media landscape, relating this to a variety of factors ranging from the advent of the ‘therapy culture’, ‘turn to affect’ and growth of autobiographical journalism to technological change associated with the era of social media and disruption to the traditional business models of news production. The chapter argues that there are two main ways in which an affective media landscape has been generated: first, through the sheer volume of emotive user-generated content that journalists are now incorporating into mainstream news reporting, and second, through a series of practices that, whether they are openly acknowledged or not, are undermining the normative codes of objectivity in favour of a journalist’s identity, feelings and personal views. The chapter concludes by exploring the performative aspects of broadcast news and elements of ritual that have entered into the coverage of stories on terror and natural disaster as part of this emotionalisation of news culture.
More than just a technological revolution
It is tempting to ascribe the fundamental changes in journalism practice we are witnessing solely to technology. But that is only one element in a host of factors that are shaping today’s news file and leading to an increase in emotive content. These changes have their roots in wider cultural phenomena and the impact of the broader ‘turns’ of the past 50 years. What technology has done is accelerated and exaggerated these influences. Assessing the state of journalism studies, Carlson et al. have identified a new phase in academic research, which they call sociotechnical, focusing on the intersecting social and technological dynamics of journalism’s transformation (2018: 8). In this ‘turn’, which coincides with upheaval in the news industry, many legacy news organisations have been grappling with fragmenting audiences, declining revenues and other challenges stemming from the rise of digital, social and mobile media technologies (2018: 8).
In terms of cultural change, Plummer, for example, argues that in what is a postmodern or late-modern turn we are part of an auto/biographical society where ‘life stories’ are everywhere (2001: 78). There is an expectation that journalists will put more of themselves into stories, sometimes sharing their emotions (just as Graham Satchell did). Research into life stories is personal, emotional and embodied work (2001: 213). Coward contends that today’s media increasingly relies on visual, emotional stories and personal voices (2013). She argues that today’s media-consuming audiences want real-life experience, ‘with all details, especially all the emotions and feelings straight from the protagonists’ mouths’ (2013: 3). That reflects the normative technique in which emotion is outsourced. But at the same time, the journalist’s experiential first-person narrative is becoming ubiquitous and can sometimes be seen as having a veracity that is closer to the ‘truth’. Bogaerts and Carpentier (2012) see an increasingly subjective tone of news reporting, evidenced partly by the wealth of blogs written by mainstream journalists, as an attempt to create a new claim on truth, switching from one based on objectivity to one based on authenticity. This personal way of engaging an audience, also seen as part of the broad evolution of a confessional society, can be interpreted as an attempt to win back an estranged public (2012: 70).
Part of this broader cultural change has also been captured in the so-called ‘turn to affect’ in the 1990s, a phrase generally credited to Patricia Clough, who defined it as ‘a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter instigating a shift in thought in critical theory’ (Clough & Halley, 2007). Massumi (2002: 27) argues that affect is key to our understanding of our late capitalist culture in which previous narratives and vocabulary are derived from theories of signification. The ‘turn to affect’ suggests a movement away from rationalist traditions of philosophy, which are often characterised as ‘Cartesian’ to signify cognitive or reason-based approaches (La Caze & Lloyd, 2011). That is, however, an oversimplified binary conception and affect scholars contend that affect and cognition are never fully separable (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Wetherell (2012: 20) makes the same point, arguing that it is futile to try to pull apart affect and meaning making. Over the past 20 years, terms loosely associated with affect have steadily gained currency. Concepts such as emotional literacy, emotional intelligence, emotional capital and emotional labour are now well established (Richards & Rees, 2011). Recent academic literature has added to this the emotional public sphere, the affective dimension of the public sphere of policy debate underpinning democratic processes (Richards, 2007); the emergence of body studies since the 1980s has been seen increasingly in the analysis of how films and television ‘work’ affectively, similarly reflecting the view of many scholars that reason and rationality have limits as a way of analysing and understanding communication processes (Blackman, 2012); the affective dimension of Reality TV has become a recent focus of analysis (Gorton, 2009; Kavka, 2008); Richards (2007: 30) tracks the rise of what he calls a broader ‘therapeutic culture’ and a shift from the private to public domain; the sociologist Furedi (2003) has criticised the erosion of the boundaries between the private and the public, with confessional television (e.g., Big Brother) deeply embedded in popular culture.
In addition, a visual turn has been fed by social media images, the ubiquitous ‘selfie’ and, in terms of journalism, the adoption of user-generated content into mainstream news reporting. In what has been called ‘the new visibility’ (Thompson, 2005), emotive unedited footage of violence and grief is finding its way into news outlets via ordinary citizens armed with little more than a mobile phone. According to Susie Linfield, we live in a world of the ‘perpetrator image’ or ‘terrorist selfie’ through which social media images are used to actually celebrate acts of violence (2015):
We live in the age of the fascist image. The cell-phone camera and lightweight video equipment – along with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and all the other wonders of social media – have allowed perpetrators of atrocities to document, and celebrate, every kind of violence, no matter how grotesque.
It is hard to think of today’s news coverage without focusing on the all-pervasive nature of digital images. They become engraved in our mind as readers and viewers of the news, not least – as the author and journalist Will Self observes in his essay ‘Click Away Now – How Bloodshed in the Desert Lost Its Reality’ (2014) – because of the ability to freeze the digital frame or replay scenes on a continual loop. Whether those images are the US military’s ‘surgical strikes’ during the analogue era of the first Gulf War in 1991, sanitised as if part of a video game, or the shocking images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib; whether they are ISIS insurgents pointing a knife at an orange-clad US hostage or the attackers
