Journalism, disasters and emotions

The relationship between journalism and emotions has been complicated ever since the profession’s “coming of age around the turn of the twentieth century”

(Wahl-Jorgensen 2016: 129-130). In fact, journalism or, more specifically, ‘good’

journalism has always been linked to ideas of objectivity, rationality and the aim to present “an emotionally detached view of the news” and events (Dennis and Merrill, cited in Wahl-Jorgensen 2016: 130). According to Schudson (2001: 150), this striving for objectivity helps “journalists to separate facts from values and to report only the facts” and “something called ‘news’ without commenting on it, slanting it, or shaping its formulation in any way”. Tuchman’s idea of the strategic ritual of objectivity relates to this:

newspapermen … believe they may mitigate such continual pressures as deadlines, possible libel suits, and anticipated reprimands of superiors by being able to claim that their work is “objective”. … objectivity may be seen as a strategic ritual protecting newspapermen from the risks of their trade.

(Tuchman 1972: 660)

Therefore, academic discussions suggested that the very nature of ‘good’

journalism opposes a relationship between journalism and emotions and that

“emotionality typically represents a decline in the standards of journalism”

(Pantti 2010: 169). As Pantti (2010: 169) notes, “while “quality” journalism informs and educates citizens by appealing to reason, other kinds of journalism focus on pleasing their audiences by appealing to the emotions” (Pantti 2010:

169). This means that the use of emotions in journalism has often been linked to tabloid journalism and ideas of sensationalism (Wahl-Jorgensen 2013: 131, 2016:

130; Pantti 2010: 169; Örnebring and Jönsson 2004: 283):

- 22 -

the sensationalized journalism of tabloid media is often denigrated in public and scholarly discourses precisely because the sensational is perceived to involve emotion in such a way as to preclude rationality and hence serious quality journalism (Sparks, 2000). While quality journalism is traditionally seen as ‘objective’ and rational, tabloid news discourse is considered to be anti-rationalist or sensationalist, in part due to its personalized story-telling and its intention to evoke emotional responses (Connell, 1998). (Wahl-Jorgensen 2013: 131)

However, recent academic research highlighted that emotions are, in fact,

“profoundly constitutive” of quality news coverage (Wahl-Jorgensen 2013: 131;

Kotišová 2017: 5). Building on Tuchman’s strategic ritual of objectivity, Wahl-Jorgensen (2013: 130) argues that there is a strategic ritual of emotionality in high quality journalism, which exists alongside that of objectivity and needs scholarly recognition. She points out that – just as the trade of news reporting almost ritual-like attempts to protect itself from risks by means of objectivity –

“there is an institutionalized and systematic practice of journalists narrating and infusing their reporting with emotion, which means that journalistic story-telling, despite its allegiance to the ideal of objectivity, is also profoundly emotional”

(Wahl-Jorgensen 2013: 130). In other words, emotionality “is just as embedded in, and central to, journalistic practice as is the strategic ritual of objectivity, though it is rarely explicitly acknowledged because it is [or may seem] at odds with journalistic self-understandings” (Wahl-Jorgensen 2013: 130).

Pantti (2010: 168) explored how this argument translates into practice. The scholar investigated how emotions are employed in routine journalism by

“examining journalists’ perceptions of the value of emotional expression in broadcast news” (Pantti 2010: 168). The results showed that journalists had a

“benign view of the presence of emotional elements in television news” and that their presence and use in quality television news has become and is perceived as increasingly normal (Pantti 2010: 171-172). Pantti (2010: 174) also established

- 23 -

that emotions have vital functions in news reports: For instance, emotion

“facilitates the intelligibility of the news story and … shape[s] the way in which the viewers watch news”; “emotion … helps deliver information … [and is] a thought-provoking and attention-capturing rhetorical device (Pantti 2010: 176).

There are three main ways in which emotions are expressed (Pantti 2010: 174).

First, they can be seen through “the emotional states of sources” (Pantti 2010:

174). This involves explicit or “subtle emotional expressions” of grief and empathy by ordinary people “through emotional displays” or “ritual performances” (Pantti 2010: 174). Second, emotions can be expressed through images (Pantti 2010:

175). Pantti explains:

The emotional power of images is such that they reveal the ‘truth’ without explanations: ‘The image is everything. When you have emotions, you do not need to say anything in the voice-over. Just show it’ (deputy editor-in-chief, RTL4). Journalists shared the view that (emotional) images tell more than words and that emotional images in television news always have greater impact than an ‘emotion-laden piece in a newspaper’ (editor-in-chief, NOS). (Pantti 2010: 175).

Third, emotions relate to the news topic (Pantti 2010: 175). This means that

“emotional content is more appropriate to some topics than to others” and can also be more easily justified for some than others (Pantti 2010: 175). In this context, Pantti (2010: 175) cites a journalist saying, “[m]aybe it is harsh to say so, but I do consider it odd to raise emotions in news production, apart from these tsunamis and such global disasters, where it comes automatically.”

This leads to the argument that ‘emotions’ “embedded in disaster narratives” play an essential role in “disaster communications” (Pantti et al. 2012: 61). Pantti et al. (2012: 61) relate this to the fact that “emotional discourses are integral to processes of assigning meaning, i.e. to shaping how we understand and respond to specific disasters”. Abu-Lughod and Lutz (1990: 11-12) argue that emotional

- 24 -

discourses are “a form of social action that creates effects in the world, effects that are read in a culturally informed way by the audience for emotion talk”.

Therefore, Pantti et al. (2012: 62) suggest that there is a need to consider emotionally evocative media content “to fully analyse how disasters are defined, responded to and politically aligned”. As Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen (2007: 5) state, disaster reporting is “emotional by nature” – be it because it pays attention to the emotions of “individuals directly affected by the tragic events” or because it focuses on “the collective emotions of the larger community reacting to the misfortunes of others like them”: “Disasters make emotions prominent because they involve reportorial practices outside of ordinary structural routines” (Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen 2007: 5).

Studying emotional discourses in disaster news, Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen (2007: 7-8, 10) explored this argument further by tracing and comparing the changing and continuing presence of emotional discourses. Based on selected case studies of human-made disasters since the 1920s, they found that disaster reporting is characterised by “four distinctive discourses through which the public emotion was articulated” (Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen 2007: 21):

Our cases suggest that the coverage of disaster always opens with an account of the horrific aspects of the event – what we here call “the discourse of horror”. This is followed by the discourse of grief, which focuses on the suffering of victims and bereaved. Such accounts, in turn, give rise to the discourse of empathy, which constructs imagined communities of shared loss by telling stories of individuals acting empathetically and heroically for the benefit of others. They call on feelings of national and community pride in accounts of heroes who provide hope and optimism by having victims. Finally, discourses of anger assign blame and call those responsible to account by telling stories of the justified rage of the afflicted (Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen 2007: 21).

- 25 -

Although the idea of tracing changing emotional discourses over more extended periods is less relevant for this thesis, the study, nonetheless, provided insights into the media’s use of emotionality. It also established a justification for the conduct of research in this area and highlighted the need and importance for further studies. Therefore, given the importance of the field for disasters and more recent acknowledgements of the role of emotions in news reporting, one of the research questions of this thesis examines how emotions feed into the reporting of airplane disasters and how the media actively construct them (see chapter 3). The next section explores previous literature on the media’s representation of ‘suffering’ because “crises, disasters, and emergencies are not about issues … They are, usually, about people” (Harrison 1999: 3).