Читать книгу Journalism and Emotion - Stephen Jukes - Страница 11

On the face of it, there appears to be little difference between the major news stories we remember from core moments of the past five decades of history ranging, for example, from the Vietnam War and the funeral of Princess Diana to the brutality of ISIS beheadings and the shooting rampage in Christchurch. Each of these stories and the accompanying images evoke strong emotions of fear, anger and grief. They are the sort of emotionally laden stories that force their way into our consciousness and remain embedded there for a lifetime. We remember where we were and what we were doing when hijacked planes flew into the Twin Towers or when we learnt of the death of Princess Diana following a car crash in Paris. Such stories dominate news coverage and can be clearly categorised, to use the term coined by Dayan and Katz, as ‘media events’ (1992) that, in the past, transcended the normal day-to-day reporting of the news.

But the dynamic of the relationship between journalism and emotion has changed in the years since September 11. Today’s big stories are no longer isolated events, and our news agenda has changed to what Liebes has called a ‘disaster marathon’ (1998) in which newspapers, news bulletins and social media serve up an almost uninterrupted diet of disaster, tragedy and personal grief. A series of factors means that we have reached a turning point where emotion is now becoming the dominant force shaping our news narrative and, by extension, public discourse. This is partly a result of the intensity and prevalence of images and the dominant role they now play in all forms of communication. The volume of images in a digital world has turned into a veritable torrent and no longer depends on a news organisation’s photographer to be on the scene to capture the moment – for example, in the way the Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured the horror of Kim Phúc’s napalm burns in Vietnam in 1972. More than 15 years ago, even before the advent of the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Sontag foresaw this phenomenon and called this surfeit of images ‘hyper-saturation’ (2003: 94). The speed and global reach of image transmission can now be measured in seconds, as opposed to the analogue days when film had to be biked back from airports or images were carefully selected and developed in the dark room for a first edition print run. Nick Ut’s iconic photo was actually delayed even further while the Associated Press bureau debated whether to transmit the picture at all since it showed the 9-year-old girl naked. Ironically, the same image was briefly blocked for the same reason by a Facebook algorithm in 2016 before protests that the image had historic importance. Today, our therapy culture is heavily driven by images. We see this socially through sharing platforms such as Facebook, the fascination with selfies and the way in which users curate their identity on a daily basis. But we also see it in newsfeeds which increasingly use such platforms for the dissemination of stories and at times embrace the same selfie culture, as graphically illustrated by the use of emotive footage from the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque attacks or the chilling pictures of the ISIS militant dubbed by the British media ‘Jihadi John’ (real name Muhammad Emwazi) as he is about to behead one of his captives. This is what the academic Susie Linfield has called the ‘terrorist selfie’ (2015), a phenomenon that pushes the symbiotic relationship between media and terrorists into the digital age.

These societal changes have also had a profound impact on the broader practice of journalism in which it is increasingly common for journalists to express their own direct opinion and feelings on the news, effectively turning their back on the normative practice of detachment. Setting aside genres such as advocacy journalism or peace journalism, it can be common now to see correspondents in the field injecting their emotions into a story. Sometimes this becomes a hallmark of their journalistic identity; we know what to expect when, for example, the BBC’s highly respected former Africa Editor Fergal Keane appears on screen. He has written passionately about the Rwandan genocide (1995) and his own emotions, not least the stresses of life as a war correspondent, his alcohol addiction and his personal reflections on the birth of his son Daniel (1996). And Keane often injects his own passion and feelings into a story, pushing the boundaries of the BBC’s guidelines on objectivity and impartiality. Sometimes that injection of emotion is not a conscious decision but happens by accident. Another BBC reporter, Graham Satchell, broke down on breakfast television when reporting live from Paris the day after the 2015 ISIS-inspired terror attack that killed 131 people as gunmen rampaged through the streets and Bataclan theatre. He was simply overcome by emotion and the trauma of what he had witnessed. Journalists today have embraced social media tools such as Twitter as an indispensable news-gathering tool in the newsroom, both to contact sources and disseminate their stories. But they also often use such platforms to create and curate a personal brand through their Twitter or Facebook feeds.

Why should we be concerned with such issues? Put simply, if journalism is to uphold its democratic role in society, inform rational public debate and hold power to account in today’s populist environment, it is vitally important that the complex relationship between news and emotion is better understood and that journalists themselves are emotionally literate. By that, I do not mean that journalists should suddenly jettison practices of hard news reporting or become ‘touchy feely’ and go soft on stories. But it does mean that we need a better understanding of emotion, how emotion is being mobilised to influence public opinion, and how people – including journalists – react to distressing events that so often lead the news. Such a mindset includes the benefits of, for example, empathic interviewing techniques and knowledge of the mental and physiological stresses that those being interviewed might be experiencing if they are caught up in deeply distressing events, as refugees, survivors of terror attacks or victims of some form of tragedy. When in June 2017 the veteran Channel 4 television news anchor Jon Snow turned up in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea to report on the fire that had engulfed the Grenfell Tower flats, which killed 72 people, he was confronted by an angry group of residents who had survived the inferno and accused the media of being a disconnected elite, out of touch with the lives of such communities. It also means that as journalists we understand the way in which populist politicians can exploit social media and mobilise powerful waves of public feeling for political advantage. The fear, as expressed by the former British Justice Secretary David Gauke, is that the acceptance of simplified, black and white arguments is contributing to a lack of trust in institutions, including the media, which at times has been complicit in this. Referring to the Daily Mail’s headline in 2016, in which it attacked judges who had made a complex ruling on Brexit as ‘enemies of the people’ (cited in Bowcott, 2019), he said:

In deploying this sort of language, we go to war with truth. We pour poison into our national conversation. But language really matters in our discourse.