brothel. The subsequent articles, one of which was headlined ‘The Confessions of a Brothel Keeper’, caused an uproar, with some advertisers boycotting the newspaper. But the campaign also led to a change in the law, raising the age of consent to 16 years. The case clearly illustrates the power of tabloid reporting. While it is not unexpected for the boundaries between a more fact-based and more sensational news reporting to be blurred during this period of rapid development of the press, it is easy to see how the practice has been replicated in the 20th and 21st centuries. While it is common to equate sensationalist copy with the need to sell newspapers, such journalism and crusades can, sometimes, serve the public good as well as dry factual reporting and even enrich journalism (Zelizer, 2000: x). Critics of the British press, who spoke out volubly during the Leveson Inquiry, contend that tabloid editors at the turn of 20th century lost sight of the press’ mission to inform in favour of generating sales and cultivating political power.
Establishment of a professional ideology
During the interwar years, on both sides of the Atlantic, the professional ideology of journalism thus became firmly established as journalists sought to establish a clear line of demarcation from other writers and erect boundaries to protect their autonomy. This manifested itself in the development of professional organisations for journalists, prizes to recognise activity that exemplified the profession, university education and a series of practices that came to define the objectivity paradigm (and to exclude emotion).
Joseph Pulitzer had endowed the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York in 1904, declaring that he wanted to ‘raise journalism to the rank of a learned profession’. Walter Lippmann, the journalist, intellectual and political commentator, stated that he wanted to upgrade the professional dignity of journalists and provide training ‘in which the ideal of objective testimony is cardinal’ (cited by Schudson, 2001: 163). The general manager of the Associated Press, Kent Cooper, spelt out the policy: ‘The journalist who deals in facts diligently developed and intelligently presented exalts his profession, and his stories need never be colourless or dull’ (2001: 162). Pulitzer was dismissive of the French press, which had not at that time adopted the fact-based approach to reporting. He criticised French reporters for expressing their own opinions, saying (cited in Chalaby, 1996: 311): ‘In America we want facts. Who cares about the philosophical speculations of our correspondents?’ Chalaby (1996: 312) attributes the slower development of Anglo-American norms in France partly to the fact that literary figures of the time such as Emile Zola, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo were more involved in journalism. The same was true in the interwar years in France, with literary figures such as Antoine de St Exupéry, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, André Malraux and George Simenon all in editorial positions. In the United Kingdom, the Chartered Institute of Journalists had been set up as early as 1883.
By the end of the 1930s, the journalistic norms of objectivity had become firmly established along lines that are still recognisable today. While there are countless different definitions, Mindich (1998) identifies the five key components of this canon as: detachment (avoidance of reporters’ opinions or preconceived views); nonpartisanship (telling both sides of a story); the inverted pyramid writing style (with the most important facts in the lead paragraph); naïve empiricism (reliance on the facts); and balance (undistorted reporting). Schudson (2001: 150) takes a similar line, saying that objectivity ‘guides journalists to separate facts from values and report only the facts’, using a ‘cool, rather than emotional’ tone. He also adds the need for journalists to represent fairly each side of a story. Highly respected figures in television journalism perpetuated the objectivity paradigm – Cronkite, for example, defined objectivity as ‘the reporting of reality, of facts, as nearly as they can be obtained without the injection of prejudice and personal opinion’ (cited in Maras, 2013: 7). And as Mindich observed (1998: 1):
If American journalism were a religion, as it has been called from time to time, its supreme deity would be ‘objectivity.’ The high priests of journalism worship ‘objectivity’.
As a result, emotion was widely seen as something that contaminated objectivity (Richards & Rees, 2011: 863) and the binary relationship between rationality and the undesirability of emotion and subjectivity became reified (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019: 25).
The paradox was – and still is – that while objectivity has been codified as a set of clearly defined practices, every journalist instinctively knows that an essential tool of the trade is the ability to capture and generate the emotions of citizens and nations (Coward, 2013). The classic ‘workaround’ that was developed involved injecting emotion into a story through the quotation of its protagonists in an institutionalised and systematic practice characterised as the ‘outsourcing’ of ‘emotion or strategic ritual of emotionality’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019: 38). By doing this, journalists are able to infuse their stories with emotion without implicating themselves since they have outsourced the emotional labour to non-journalists. While the objectivity paradigm is specifically held aloft and is central to journalism teaching, this outsourcing constitutes a form of tacit knowledge that is implicit in everyday work (2019: 39).
Fears of manipulation
During the 1930s, the development of journalism’s objectivity rules, and the subsequent sidelining of emotion, took place against the background of the rise of fascism in Europe and an increasing focus on the ability of propaganda and media to manipulate people’s emotions. This was particularly the case in Nazi Germany and Italy as Hitler and Mussolini rose to power, where the tone and rhetoric of political speeches and rallies were highly emotional and targeted the public’s emotions. In his work Mein Kampf, written in 1925, Hitler wrote (Manheim, trans., 1971):
Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. And all great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of literary aesthetics and drawing room heroes.
But the focus was also on the manipulative power of media as radio and Hollywood films became increasingly popular. A case in point was the 1938 American radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which led to widespread panic in what appears to have been a classic blurring of the boundaries between (what people mistakenly took to be) news and entertainment. The incident played a pivotal role in the development of journalistic norms (Orr, 2006: 40), posing the question of whether rationality and reason could withstand mass illusion and delusion animated through what was then the relatively new broadcast medium of radio. ‘The War of the Worlds’, an episode of the US radio drama series Mercury Theater on the Air, was broadcast by CBS on 30 October 1938. The episode was directed and narrated by the filmmaker Orson Welles and was based on the H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds. The first two-thirds of the hour-long broadcast was in the shape of a news bulletin, with the result that many listeners thought an invasion by Martians was underway. The anxiety caused by the broadcast, in which a reporter tells the story of a meteorite that has landed in New Jersey, can be traced in part to the fact that some listeners only heard parts of the story and missed the beginning, in which it is clearly framed as fiction. The New York Times headline the next day stated ‘Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact’ and recounted how many people across North America had fled their homes. Over the next month, 12,500 newspaper stories referred to the panic.
The event has become pivotal in the study of media and panic, contagion and suggestion (Orr, 2006) and can be located squarely in the debate over the suggestibility of audiences and media effects. It came at a time when fiction and film were fascinated by hypnotism, suggestion and crime (Blackman, 2010), as US journalists were distancing themselves from Public Relations at home (Schudson, 2001), and when America was learning with increasing anxiety about fascism’s mass appeal in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. At this time, the radio audience constituted a new configuration of shared social space (Orr,
