way of viewing the journalistic world (2000: ix). At critical historical and cultural junctures, journalism as a profession and some academic scholarship have tended to view emotion as contaminants of objectivity, threats to the ability to promote rational discourse and, often by extension, threats to the maintenance of a liberal democratic society. As Deuze has observed (2005: 3), the 20th century saw the emergence of a consensual occupational ideology amongst journalists with a similar value system. And the shaping of such ideologies over time is typically accompanied by a process in which other ideas and views are excluded or marginalised (2005: 4). As early as 1859, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, although an advocate of freedom of speech, identified the capacity of news to whip up emotions, considering it a danger to democracy. More than 150 years later, Papacharissi (2015: 10), in exploring the relationship between social media and political life, noted that it is still common (and misplaced) to think that emotion gets in the way of rational decision-making and can lead people to behave in ways they may later regret. As I explore in later chapters, the literature shows that these tensions are likely to come to the surface at times of crisis or deep introspection in journalism, whether it be the Vietnam War or the soul searching of American journalism in the period after the September 11 attacks in 2001. An historic investigation shows that the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, although amplified problematically through today’s social media, is by no means a new phenomenon and can be traced back to the beginnings of the modern newspaper industry in the United States and England. As such, I argue that binary oppositions in which emotion is bad and rational-intellectual is good are too simplistic, that journalism is often emotional and that emotional journalism can serve the public good (Örnebring & Jönsson, 2004). The muckraking tradition of the US press, dating back to the 1850s, understood how to use emotion to illustrate a story, inform and generate a public response. But as commercial pressures grew, sensationalism was increasingly used as a method to boost circulation and bolster profitability. It was no different in the United Kingdom or countries such as Germany, where today’s mass circulation tabloid newspaper Bild has thrived on a mixture of salacious gossip, scandal and sensation. As such, it is also difficult to disregard the important role of the political economy in the relationship between news, journalism and emotion. The most profitable stream of news is often found in material with strong emotional content, especially if it points to danger and loss (Richards & Rees, 2011). The excesses of the UK tabloid press in the recent past, which resulted in a public outcry and the Leveson Inquiry, showed graphically what can happen when this is pushed by harsh commercial pressure to the extreme. The ‘Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press’ chaired by Lord Justice Leveson was highly critical of the newspaper industry, saying in its final report that some behaviour ranged from the criminal to the indefensibly unethical (2012).
On the other hand, this book also attempts to go beyond the craft skills and outward façade of practice to identify, define and categorise the affective dimension of news journalism. It argues that practice is not just the result of history, training manuals or ‘learning on the job’. There are also underlying affective processes, behaviours and practices that, when combined with consideration of other factors such as the nature of a story and the competitive environment, afford a better understanding of the everyday lived experience of news journalism, particularly when journalists are covering distressing stories. This does not mean that traditional means of analysing journalism are cast aside; there is no denying the impact of societal and cultural changes, technological advances and commercial pressures on today’s news environment. But I also contend that such traditional methods of analysis are limited both in the world of ‘old media’ and in our current age of social media, and that the affective dimension can add an important new perspective. Traditional methods have tended to sideline the body, sensation and affect in understanding the process of communication (Blackman, 2012). The following chapters reference work by affect scholars such as Lisa Blackman (2007, 2010, 2012), Christian Borch (2006), Richard Grusin (2010), Tony Sampson (2011, 2012), the late Couze Venn (2010) and Margaret Wetherell (2012). Methodologically, the book draws most heavily on the work of the last of these two affect theorists and considers journalism as a community of affective practice. Addressing this affective dimension of practice, and issues of contagion, has particular relevance in today’s ‘age of networks’ as we witness and investigate the impact of social media in events as diverse as the 2008 global banking crisis, the Arab Spring or the recent wave of ISIS-inspired terror attacks in Europe. Affect scholars such as Sampson have pointed out how Middle East dictators recognised how revolutionary contagion can spread from one country to another and that the transmission of affect spreads through the population (2012: 163). But while Sampson and others have used the lens of affect to investigate such socio-political trends, to date, there has been relatively little exploration or application of affect to the actual practice of journalism and how, when combined with traditional perspectives, this might enrich our understanding of the way in which the coverage of news stories works. Instead of viewing journalism from the outside solely through the perspective of, for example, the political economy, professional norms or craft dimensions, this book adopts an ‘inside-out’ approach. It argues that there are two main affective behaviours of journalists when they are covering ‘hard news’ – one I have called ‘cool detached’, the other ‘autopilot’. To the outside world, both behaviours are consistent with normative values of objectivity and, to all intents and purposes, it appears that the journalist is going about his or her job in a classically defined professional manner, untouched by the drama and emotion of a breaking news story. But below the surface there are unconscious, automatic processes at play, readily recognisable and reflexively related to the actions of fellow journalists in their community of affective practice (cf. Wetherell, 2012: 129). These affective behaviours can, in turn, help journalists shield themselves from the distressing nature of what they sometimes witness. This is, in short, what I term ‘affective journalism’.
What emerges from the interviews and case studies featured in this book is a complex picture of individuals continually grappling with competing tensions – on the one hand, a deeply ingrained, virtually hard-wired notion of what it is to be a professional journalist together with commercial or competitive pressures, and on the other hand, personal feelings, internal dilemmas and hesitancies.
An emotional refinement of the journalist’s mindset
On the face of it, there appears to be little difference between the major news stories we remember from core moments of the past five decades of history ranging, for example, from the Vietnam War and the funeral of Princess Diana to the brutality of ISIS beheadings and the shooting rampage in Christchurch. Each of these stories and the accompanying images evoke strong emotions of fear, anger and grief. They are the sort of emotionally laden stories that force their way into our consciousness and remain embedded there for a lifetime. We remember where we were and what we were doing when hijacked planes flew into the Twin Towers or when we learnt of the death of Princess Diana following a car crash in Paris. Such stories dominate news coverage and can be clearly categorised, to use the term coined by Dayan and Katz, as ‘media events’ (1992) that, in the past, transcended the normal day-to-day reporting of the news.
But the dynamic of the relationship between journalism and emotion has changed in the years since September 11. Today’s big stories are no longer isolated events, and our news agenda has changed to what Liebes has called a ‘disaster marathon’ (1998) in which newspapers, news bulletins and social media serve up an almost uninterrupted diet of disaster, tragedy and personal grief. A series of factors means that we have reached a turning point where emotion is now becoming the dominant force shaping our news narrative and, by extension, public discourse. This is partly a result of the intensity and prevalence of images and the dominant role they now play in all forms of communication. The volume of images in a digital world has turned into a veritable torrent and no longer depends on a news organisation’s photographer to be on the scene to capture the moment – for example, in the way the Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured the horror of Kim Phúc’s napalm burns in Vietnam in 1972. More than 15 years ago, even before the advent of the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Sontag foresaw this phenomenon and called this surfeit of images ‘hyper-saturation’
