repertoires and worked through personal histories. This is one of the foundation stones of the methodology that I have adopted in this book and the basis on which I consider journalism to be a community of affective practice.
I had certainly not always viewed journalism in this way, and this book is part of a personal journey of mine from journalist to academic. Before entering the academic world, I had enjoyed a more than 20-year career with the international news agency Reuters, working as a foreign correspondent and editor around the world. There had barely been a moment to pause and consider my own practice. As an agency journalist, there were times when a story was measured solely on the speed of its production and in seconds – being first with the news (and correct) is the ethos of agency journalism. On big breaking news stories, we were all caught up in the moment and the adrenalin rush. But Reuters has built its reputation on something other than just speed, namely its ability to deliver impartial, objective news. On the face of it, stories were stripped of adjectives or emotive words in what was a clipped, fact-based house style. In the early years of my career, bylines were rare and the correspondent remained largely anonymous as copy was processed and reused by media subscribers around the world. A Reuters story simply stated the date and place, the ‘dateline’, and prided itself on being factually accurate with no spin. The motto was ‘let the facts speak for themselves’. When I became the Global Head of News in 2000, I also became the high priest of Reuters’ reputation for objectivity, responsible for upholding that mantra, whether it be in the way the news was produced or whether it was fighting to maintain the independence of Reuters against attempts by investors to build up a controlling stake that could potentially exert influence over editorial operations. Reuters had formulated what it called its ‘Trust Principles’ in 1941, designed to uphold the news organisation’s independence, integrity and freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news. Crucially, the principles were carried over when Reuters became a publicly traded company in the 1980s. The entrenched and deeply polarised Israeli–Palestinian conflict routinely tested these Trust Principles and sometimes led to passionate criticism from both sides. But the most difficult challenge came with the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in 2001. A memo I wrote to journalists shortly afterwards saying that we needed to be wary of using the term ‘terrorist’ was leaked to the Washington Post’s media columnist Howard Kurtz, who promptly made a major story out of it. I had included in that memo a phrase we had often used before, namely that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’.
What followed was outrage across America at Reuters’ use of a ‘value neutral’ term and a torrent of personal abuse. The logic behind the memo had been that the word ‘terrorist’ had become emotionally laden and it had been Reuters’ policy to describe acts rather than to try to ascribe motive to those carrying out acts. But in the context of the horrific attacks in New York and Washington, DC, this was deeply insensitive and even divided opinion among Reuters journalists in newsrooms across the world. The storm blew over in time but has never really gone away. And with hindsight, that episode marked the start of my reflection on the complex and difficult relationship between journalism, emotion and objectivity, a reflection that has become one of the focal points of my academic work over the past 15 years.
Overview of chapters
The first chapter, Objectivity and Emotion, examines how these two concepts came to be viewed (falsely) as binary opposites and how in the normative Anglo-American objectivity paradigm emotion became frowned upon as a marker of poor journalism or ‘soft’ news. The origins of the objectivity norm are clearly contested academically, but this chapter argues that it arose principally as a professional code of practice in the late 19th century and early 20th century, partly to add credibility to journalism as a profession and partly to distinguish it (and defend it) from other emerging disciplines, most notably Public Relations. As Carlson and Lewis observe in relation to contemporary practice (2015: 2), the struggle over such professional boundaries often leads to different actors competing to apply or remove the label of journalism. The chapter sets the historical background and traces the recurring early challenges to the objectivity paradigm (such as the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s) during the analogue era before the advent of social media.
Chapter 2, Journalism and the Rise of Emotion in a Post-truth Society, focuses on more recent developments where the doubts around the objectivity paradigm resurface in the digital environment and the boundaries between traditional journalism and content on social media become increasingly blurred. It charts the rise of emotion in today’s 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, disruption to the traditional business models of news production, and the widespread use of user-generated content (UGC), which often includes raw, unedited emotive content. The chapter traces these developments against the broader trend of emotionalisation in popular culture, which had become well established by the late 1980s in the United Kingdom and was later played out with the public outpouring of grief over the death of Princess Diana in 1997. This chapter also looks at the performative aspect 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 culture.
The third chapter, Journalism Practice and Affect, identifies, categorises and describes the affective practices and behaviours of journalists, focusing particularly on coverage of traumatic news stories. These include the shooting of primary school children in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, in the pre-Internet era, and several contemporary stories dominated by social media ranging from the Syrian conflict to terror attacks in London and Paris. As outlined above, the chapter identifies two main affective behaviours, those of ‘cool detached’ and ‘autopilot’. It discusses how detachment can play multiple roles – outwardly displaying behaviour associated with professional journalism, as a practical tool to meet the commercial imperative to ‘get the story’, and serving as a defence mechanism against traumatic events being covered.
Chapter 4, Interviewing and Emotion, explores further the affective dimension of journalism practice, focusing on how journalists interview those caught up in conflict, disaster or private grief, and in wider contexts. The chapter examines the interview’s function as an affective ‘site of emergence’ in which the journalist, schooled in the professional norms of detachment, comes into contact with a victim of trauma who can be anything but detached. It argues that journalists, through experience and self-reflection, tend to build up their own affective practice of interviewing which sometimes casts aside the harsher edges of the objectivity norm and relies on a more empathic approach. This affective practice often occurs automatically with little conscious monitoring.
Chapter 5, The Herd Instinct, examines what is sometimes known as ‘pack journalism’ and the affective contagion that can occur between journalists when they arrive en masse to cover a scene of a big breaking news story. Such journalism has a long history and was famously captured in Timothy Crouse’s account of the 1972 Nixon–McGovern US presidential campaign Boys on the Bus. The chapter explores the origins of that contagion and herd instinct, which is partly due to commercial pressures to deliver the story ahead of the competition and personal pressures not to miss the story and be scooped by rivals. But it also investigates the affective dimension that binds groups of journalists together in ways that are at a non-conscious level.
The sixth chapter, Journalism and Trauma, concentrates on the potential trauma suffered by journalists exposed to difficult news stories in the field or material they are handling in the newsroom, the mental health risks and measures to reduce them. It draws on personal interviews with journalists and best practice developed by the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, a global charity based at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. The Dart Center provides support for journalists suffering
