often late on a Friday afternoon when many would be heading off for a weekend break. Natalie Fenton encouraged me to question journalism’s norms and shook me out of the comfortable world of my past. We did not see eye to eye on regulation of the British press (in the midst of the Leveson Inquiry) but her advice and guidance was invaluable. Lisa Blackman, in the next-door office of the New Academic Building at Goldsmiths, now the Professor Stuart Hall Building, introduced me to the world of affect, in all its (sometimes extreme) variations, opening up new horizons, new authors and a new way of thinking about journalism. At my home institution, Bournemouth University, I would like to thank my colleagues and particularly Barry Richards, one of the pioneering academics working in the field of psychosocial research into politics, culture and media. Further afield, thanks also go to Cardiff University professors Stuart Allan, a former colleague at Bournemouth University, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen for their support and encouragement. The latter has been at the forefront of academic research into emotion and media and always, it must be said, several steps ahead of me. When I moved into the academic world in 2005, I also found a home in the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma where I have been part of a drive to increase the emotional literacy of journalism and safeguard the mental health of journalists. I am indebted to the former BBC journalist Mark Brayne, who was inspirational in putting such issues on the agenda and introduced me to Dart. Since then, I have worked closely with the organisation’s Executive Director Bruce Shapiro and European Director Gavin Rees, both of whom are internationally recognised as experts in the field and have become firm friends. I would like to thank the team at SAGE for their support in planning and producing this book, Michael Ainsley and Amber Turner-Flanders. And special thanks are due to my wife Yvonne, whose painstaking proofreading has been invaluable, and children Dominic and Timothy. The cries of ‘are you still writing that book?’ echoing through the Bavarian countryside (as I messed up another holiday) have for the moment ceased. Until the next one …
About the Author
Stephen Jukes is Professor of Journalism in the Faculty of Media & Communication at Bournemouth University. He worked in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas as a foreign correspondent and Global Head of News for Reuters before moving into the academic world in 2005. His academic research focuses on areas of objectivity and emotion in news with an emphasis on affect, trauma and conflict journalism. He works with the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, chairs the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma in Europe and is a trustee of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.
Introduction How Emotion Lies at the Heart of Today’s News and Journalism Practice
When a 28-year-old Australian gunman went on the rampage in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, killing 51 Muslims at Friday prayers, he streamed his cold-blooded attack live on Facebook using a helmet-mounted GoPro camera. It was not the first time this had been tried, but an earlier attempt, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in France in 2015, had failed for want of an Internet connection. This time, however, the killer succeeded and the video footage, shot on a miniature camera normally used to capture extreme sports action, was immediately reposted, spreading rapidly across multiple social media platforms faster than it could be taken down. Crucially, in their rush to cover a major breaking news story, several news organisations incorporated edited versions into their online reporting before a public outcry forced them to remove the material and issue apologies.
Given the advances in digital technology and the torrent of dramatic footage of news events circulating online from members of the public and perpetrators of such acts, it is hardly surprising that today’s mainstream news agenda is likely to serve up a diet of atrocities, disaster and personal tragedy. Media organisations know full well the power of images to attract an audience, particularly at a time when their business models are under severe financial pressure. We live in a world of live-streamed terror, polarised political debates and fake news, a news landscape in which emotions and the appeal to emotions often dominate stories at the expense of fact-based journalism or rational debate. It seems as if the old cliché ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ has never been more true.
It is tempting to see this emotionalisation of the news as a new phenomenon that has swept aside normative concepts of objectivity and detachment that emerged in Anglo-American journalism in the late 19th century. Indeed, the sheer volume of emotive content that can be served up by the ubiquitous mobile phone and instant sharing technology has revolutionised journalism practice and opened up new ways of storytelling. Reality TV dominates tabloid headlines, social media has become an indispensable tool in the newsroom, and some journalists are happy to profess their emotions and opinions on screen. It has become second nature for a journalist to develop a ‘personal brand’. But on the other hand, notions of objectivity and detachment remain deeply embedded in many mainstream Western news organisations, and the fact of the matter is that journalism has always relied on emotion to attract attention and engage its readers and viewers.
The academic and BBC historian Jean Seaton captured this paradox and what is effectively a day-to-day juggling act for every journalist as follows (2005: 231):
The reporter’s first fear is of being boring. The best news is ‘hot’, which also means that it is commanding. It crashes through routine order and ‘demands’ attention. It is fashioned in the newsroom in order to be ‘sharp’ and ‘punchy’ – to create an impact: so far from being emotionally neutral, it is designed to stir, arouse and manipulate.
It is a tension that has rarely been voiced, indeed until recently it can be argued that objectivity enjoyed talismanic status (Richards & Rees, 2011) and any talk of emotion in the world of serious news journalism was taboo. In the past, I have referred to the use of emotion as ‘journalism’s dirty little secret’. But today that secret is out in the open for everyone to see.
Two perspectives
This book explores this fundamental tension at the heart of today’s journalism and argues that we have reached a turning point in which emotion – either wittingly or unwittingly, consciously or unconsciously – is now becoming a dominant force shaping the practice of journalism in what has become an affective news environment. The chapters that follow tackle the issue of journalism and emotion through two main perspectives: that of journalists’ practice and that of their lived experience. It is often difficult to disentangle the two, but one is essentially a constructed use of emotion as part of the craft of journalism, the other is embodied and affective.
On the one hand, these chapters explore how journalists through their day-to-day practice have attempted to square the circle, drawing on the raw emotion of stories they are covering to convey the excitement of events and attract audiences while still trying to adhere to the objectivity paradigm that is seen as a hallmark of their professional standing. It is a practice or craft skill that has been cleverly described as the ‘outsourcing’ of emotion (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013), a technique by which emotion is injected into a story through quoting the feelings of those who are interviewed (and not the feelings of the journalist). As technology advanced over the past 150 years and as each new news medium gained prominence – from the growth of newspapers to radio, television, the Internet and social media – so the ability to capture and generate the emotions of citizens and nations became an essential tool of the trade (Coward, 2013). But when it came to codifying journalism’s values, emotion was sidelined or, at least, consciously kept in check through practices (such as outsourcing) that were deemed acceptable to the objectivity norm. In their crudest binary form, the journalistic norms of news reporting pit objective against subjective, fact against emotion, rationality against irrationality. Emotion in journalism has traditionally been associated with tabloid journalism, and tabloid journalism by extension is ‘bad’ journalism. As Zelizer has observed, the thrust to identify certain forms of journalism practice as ‘good’ journalism and the prevailing counterthrust to excommunicate certain
