Journalism and Emotion - Stephen Jukes

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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, 2006). It was unclear how electronic modes of address and such new technologies of representation would alter or amplify information. Orr poses the question of the day as follows (2006: 40):

      Could rationality and the imperatives of reason withstand the mass illusions or delusions made more likely, and more mass(ive), by the senses and sensations excited through the new broadcast media?

      Analysis after the broadcast showed that the initial talk of mass panic was probably inaccurate or at least exaggerated. Newspapers were happy to play up and censure what they highlighted as the irresponsibility of radio, a relatively new medium which was already threatening to eat into their advertising revenues. ‘Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities’, said the New York Times. ‘It has not mastered itself or the material it uses.’ Hadley Cantril, a psychologist at Princeton University, conducted a study published in 1940 in which he concluded that at least one million of the six million listeners were ‘frightened or disturbed’ (1940: 57). The study showed that the majority of listeners had, however, been able to use their critical abilities to discern the true nature of the programme. As such, the study undermined prevailing theories that audiences could be wholly manipulated by media. The incident also crucially raised questions about the interplay of news and entertainment and looked forward to contemporary discussion about the blurring of boundaries and the affective potential that mixed media formats such as Reality TV and docudrama can command.

      But Cantril represented a minority view in a period in which theories of the suggestibility of audiences and mass society tended to predominate. Given the developments in Nazi Germany following Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, some exiled scholars from Germany’s Frankfurt School were to take a less nuanced view than Cantril. They interpreted the media through their neo-Marxist background in a way that rendered ordinary people as a ‘mass society’ helpless to resist media manipulation (Curran & Seaton, 1997). Such an interpretation was clearly influenced by the ability of dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini to captivate the masses. Indeed, Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, had studied Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules in the 1920s (Der Spiegel, 1986). Gorton (2009) argues that scholars of the Frankfurt School such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno believed that fascism in Europe had demonstrated the power of mass propaganda and the arts.

      By the summer of 1934, members of the Frankfurt School led by Horkheimer had begun to establish themselves in exile in New York at Columbia University, regarded as having the second major department for Sociology after Chicago. By 1941, Horkheimer and a whole colony

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