Journalism and Emotion. Stephen Jukes

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      1 Objectivity and Emotion

      The words stuck in my throat. A sob wanted to replace them. A gulp or two quashed the sob, which metamorphosed into tears forming in the corners of my eyes. I fought back the emotion and regained my professionalism, but it was touch and go there for a few seconds before I could continue …

      Walter Cronkite (1997)

      In 1963, as he read the news of President Kennedy’s death live on air, the veteran news anchor Walter Cronkite shed a tear. For him that tear was an emotional lapse that threatened to undermine his ‘professionalism’, a carefully cultivated air of detachment that made him America’s most trusted news anchor. It was an era when journalism prized objectivity and, on his death in 2009, Time magazine called him ‘TV’s patron saint of objectivity’ (Poniewozik, 2009). The tear, of course, showed the human side of Cronkite and was arguably one of the reasons why he was so trusted. He was echoing the feelings of millions of Americans. It also illustrates the paradox that lies at the heart of journalism: the constant tension between a journalist’s human emotions and the deeply embedded normative values that are encapsulated by the word objectivity, above all the concept of detachment. On the one hand, journalists are expected to maintain a distance from their subject matter or the scene of action, but on the other hand, as Coward has observed, reportage – one of the cornerstones of journalism – is premised on the first-person presence of the observer and bearing witness (2013: 21, 29).

      This chapter examines how emotion was sidelined in the canon of Anglo-American journalism and, in some quarters, became associated with unprincipled and flawed journalism (Peters, 2011: 298). It traces the origin and rise of the objectivity paradigm as the dominant force in the daily discourse about journalism and in universities where journalism is taught. It explores definitions of objectivity and how, because of the fundamental philosophical flaw in the concept, it became embedded in journalism culture as a series of practices. Finally, the chapter explores the persistent challenges to the prevailing norms in the analogue era, from legendary journalists such as the novelist and conflict journalist Martha Gellhorn, to the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, through to journalism of attachment during the Balkans Wars of the 1990s and, finally, the outpouring of journalistic emotion that accompanied the September 11 attacks in 2001.

      How emotion became sidelined in Anglo-American journalism

      A number of prominent journalists today, typically from ‘legacy’ news organisations, are decrying the rise of emotion in news and arguing that it is time to return to objective, fact-based journalism and a good old-fashioned ‘boots on the ground’ style of reporting (Jukes, 2018: 1033). But amongst these pleas it is all too easy to forget that those normative values of objectivity are relatively new and only emerged in the Anglo-American news sphere in the late 19th century. Before then, journalism had been overtly subjective and emotional and it was only later, as the profession of journalism was codified, that emotion was marginalised.

      In the era before the development of mass printing, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic had been openly partisan and subjective. In the early days of US press expansion, enabled by the introduction of the rotary press and the steam-powered press, newspapers were expected to present a partisan viewpoint. This began to change with the introduction of the ‘penny press’ in the United States as commercial competition increased and editors competed for a wider audience by filling columns with local news concentrating on crime and (still generally partisan) politics (Schudson, 2001). The New York Sun, founded by Benjamin Day, was launched in 1833 for one penny, appealing to working-class readers and undercutting the traditional market of six-cent newspapers which had targeted a more affluent audience. Stories were often dominated by sensationalist content, muckraking and emotion. In a move reminiscent of current debates in media, the penny press was quickly accused of vulgarity and sensationalism and of lowering standards. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, the press was generally viewed during the mid-Victorian years as an ‘educational agent’ by the dominant classes (Hampton, 2001). Lurking just below the surface of this educational role were deep class divisions, with the dominant elite keen to ensure that the working classes held ‘proper’ opinions (2001: 215).

      Beyond the confines of the newspaper industry, there was also a fascination at this time with ideas of emotion, suggestion and contagion. The late 19th century saw a fertile cross-pollination of ideas, bringing together scientists, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, medical doctors, physicists, spiritualists and psychiatrists to discuss forms of communication that crossed the boundaries between the human and non-human, the material and ephemeral, and even between the living and the dead (Blackman, 2010). These ideas infused artistic life on both sides of the Atlantic, from authors such as Guy de Maupassant and Franz Kafka to emerging filmmakers who were fascinated by hypnotism and crime. Andriopoulos (2008) tells the tale of a Parisian shoemaker, Jean Mollinier, who shot himself in 1887 after believing himself to be possessed by an invisible spirit. The Parisian press saw fit to report the story under the headline ‘The Dangers of Hypnotism’ (Andriopoulos, 2008: 1). A similar tale had already been the subject of a Maupassant short story, Le Horla, written before the suicide but published just four days later. Andriapoulos tracks in his account a series of films bearing testimony to the fascination with suggestion and hypnotism, including Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), the latter being the story of a criminal mastermind who uses powers of hypnosis and mind control to oversee rackets СКАЧАТЬ