transmission can now be measured in seconds, as opposed to the analogue days when film had to be biked back from airports or images were carefully selected and developed in the dark room for a first edition print run. Nick Ut’s iconic photo was actually delayed even further while the Associated Press bureau debated whether to transmit the picture at all since it showed the 9-year-old girl naked. Ironically, the same image was briefly blocked for the same reason by a Facebook algorithm in 2016 before protests that the image had historic importance. Today, our therapy culture is heavily driven by images. We see this socially through sharing platforms such as Facebook, the fascination with selfies and the way in which users curate their identity on a daily basis. But we also see it in newsfeeds which increasingly use such platforms for the dissemination of stories and at times embrace the same selfie culture, as graphically illustrated by the use of emotive footage from the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque attacks or the chilling pictures of the ISIS militant dubbed by the British media ‘Jihadi John’ (real name Muhammad Emwazi) as he is about to behead one of his captives. This is what the academic Susie Linfield has called the ‘terrorist selfie’ (2015), a phenomenon that pushes the symbiotic relationship between media and terrorists into the digital age.
These societal changes have also had a profound impact on the broader practice of journalism in which it is increasingly common for journalists to express their own direct opinion and feelings on the news, effectively turning their back on the normative practice of detachment. Setting aside genres such as advocacy journalism or peace journalism, it can be common now to see correspondents in the field injecting their emotions into a story. Sometimes this becomes a hallmark of their journalistic identity; we know what to expect when, for example, the BBC’s highly respected former Africa Editor Fergal Keane appears on screen. He has written passionately about the Rwandan genocide (1995) and his own emotions, not least the stresses of life as a war correspondent, his alcohol addiction and his personal reflections on the birth of his son Daniel (1996). And Keane often injects his own passion and feelings into a story, pushing the boundaries of the BBC’s guidelines on objectivity and impartiality. Sometimes that injection of emotion is not a conscious decision but happens by accident. Another BBC reporter, Graham Satchell, broke down on breakfast television when reporting live from Paris the day after the 2015 ISIS-inspired terror attack that killed 131 people as gunmen rampaged through the streets and Bataclan theatre. He was simply overcome by emotion and the trauma of what he had witnessed. Journalists today have embraced social media tools such as Twitter as an indispensable news-gathering tool in the newsroom, both to contact sources and disseminate their stories. But they also often use such platforms to create and curate a personal brand through their Twitter or Facebook feeds.
Why should we be concerned with such issues? Put simply, if journalism is to uphold its democratic role in society, inform rational public debate and hold power to account in today’s populist environment, it is vitally important that the complex relationship between news and emotion is better understood and that journalists themselves are emotionally literate. By that, I do not mean that journalists should suddenly jettison practices of hard news reporting or become ‘touchy feely’ and go soft on stories. But it does mean that we need a better understanding of emotion, how emotion is being mobilised to influence public opinion, and how people – including journalists – react to distressing events that so often lead the news. Such a mindset includes the benefits of, for example, empathic interviewing techniques and knowledge of the mental and physiological stresses that those being interviewed might be experiencing if they are caught up in deeply distressing events, as refugees, survivors of terror attacks or victims of some form of tragedy. When in June 2017 the veteran Channel 4 television news anchor Jon Snow turned up in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea to report on the fire that had engulfed the Grenfell Tower flats, which killed 72 people, he was confronted by an angry group of residents who had survived the inferno and accused the media of being a disconnected elite, out of touch with the lives of such communities. It also means that as journalists we understand the way in which populist politicians can exploit social media and mobilise powerful waves of public feeling for political advantage. The fear, as expressed by the former British Justice Secretary David Gauke, is that the acceptance of simplified, black and white arguments is contributing to a lack of trust in institutions, including the media, which at times has been complicit in this. Referring to the Daily Mail’s headline in 2016, in which it attacked judges who had made a complex ruling on Brexit as ‘enemies of the people’ (cited in Bowcott, 2019), he said:
In deploying this sort of language, we go to war with truth. We pour poison into our national conversation. But language really matters in our discourse.
A question of definition
What do we actually mean by the terms emotion and affect? They seem to be bandied around at liberty and sometimes interchangeably, with phrases such as emotional intelligence, emotional labour and emotional literacy becoming part of everyday discourse. My Bournemouth University colleague Barry Richards has tracked the rise of what he calls a broader ‘therapeutic culture’ and a shift from the private to public domain (2007: 30); the sociologist Frank Furedi (2003) has criticised the erosion of boundaries between the private and public as confessional television (e.g., Big Brother, or more recently the Jeremy Kyle Show and Love Island) becomes deeply embedded in popular culture. Furedi has gone so far as to argue that today’s society takes emotion so seriously that almost every challenge or misfortune experienced in life is seen as a direct threat to a person’s emotional well-being (2003: 1). Certainly, as Wahl-Jorgensen documents in her groundbreaking book Emotions, Media and Politics (2019), the term emotion is hotly contested across the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Throughout this book I subscribe to the idea that there is a distinction between emotion and affect, and that the application of theories of affect to the study of journalism has the potential to challenge and disrupt traditional ways of thinking about journalism by shifting the focus away from analysis based solely on representation, professional norms or the political economy towards the unconscious. Indeed, one of the most prominent affect theorists, Brian Massumi (2002: 27), has referred to a growing feeling within media, literary and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information and image-based late capitalist culture in which, he argues, so-called master narratives are perceived to have floundered. That is not to say that there is one singular theory of affect or that the difference between affect and emotion is universally agreed on.
The comprehensive Affect Theory Reader (2010) by Gregg and Seigworth identifies no fewer than eight different orientations in affect theory, drawing on interdisciplinary discourses that take in the political economy, philosophy, literary studies, cultural criticism, biotechnology, information theory, neuroscience and psychology. One of the most common definitions of affect is that it refers to those registers of experience which cannot be easily seen and which can be described, variously, as non-cognitive, trans-subjective, non-conscious, non-representational, incorporeal and immaterial (Blackman, 2012: 4). Affect is generally seen as referring not to a specific thing, but rather to processes that circulate and pass between bodies and are therefore difficult to capture by conventional methodology. Affect thus arises in the midst of in-between-ness, in the capacities to act and be acted upon (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010: 1).
The frequently cited difference between emotion and affect is that emotion refers to a sociological expression of feelings while affect is more firmly rooted in biology/neuroscience and a physical response. In this model, emotion requires a subject while affect does not. Kavka, who applies ideas of affect to Reality TV, argues in a similar fashion that affect is the zone of potential emotions, which have not yet been perceived as such, a ‘primordial soup’ of feeling (2008: x). Affect is therefore both more and less than emotion since it covers the whole range of feelings before they have been assessed or identified in relation to a particular object or source (2008: 29). In her discussion of ‘affective practice’, Wetherell talks about an unarticulated hinterland of possible semiotic connections. She argues that what we do is non-conscious in the sense that these possible meanings and significances exceed what can be grasped or articulated at any particular moment (2012: 129). These webs of semiotic connections,
