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What do we actually mean by the terms emotion and affect? They seem to be bandied around at liberty and sometimes interchangeably, with phrases such as emotional intelligence, emotional labour and emotional literacy becoming part of everyday discourse. My Bournemouth University colleague Barry Richards has tracked the rise of what he calls a broader ‘therapeutic culture’ and a shift from the private to public domain (2007: 30); the sociologist Frank Furedi (2003) has criticised the erosion of boundaries between the private and public as confessional television (e.g., Big Brother, or more recently the Jeremy Kyle Show and Love Island) becomes deeply embedded in popular culture. Furedi has gone so far as to argue that today’s society takes emotion so seriously that almost every challenge or misfortune experienced in life is seen as a direct threat to a person’s emotional well-being (2003: 1). Certainly, as Wahl-Jorgensen documents in her groundbreaking book Emotions, Media and Politics (2019), the term emotion is hotly contested across the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Throughout this book I subscribe to the idea that there is a distinction between emotion and affect, and that the application of theories of affect to the study of journalism has the potential to challenge and disrupt traditional ways of thinking about journalism by shifting the focus away from analysis based solely on representation, professional norms or the political economy towards the unconscious. Indeed, one of the most prominent affect theorists, Brian Massumi (2002: 27), has referred to a growing feeling within media, literary and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information and image-based late capitalist culture in which, he argues, so-called master narratives are perceived to have floundered. That is not to say that there is one singular theory of affect or that the difference between affect and emotion is universally agreed on.

The comprehensive Affect Theory Reader (2010) by Gregg and Seigworth identifies no fewer than eight different orientations in affect theory, drawing on interdisciplinary discourses that take in the political economy, philosophy, literary studies, cultural criticism, biotechnology, information theory, neuroscience and psychology. One of the most common definitions of affect is that it refers to those registers of experience which cannot be easily seen and which can be described, variously, as non-cognitive, trans-subjective, non-conscious, non-representational, incorporeal and immaterial (Blackman, 2012: 4). Affect is generally seen as referring not to a specific thing, but rather to processes that circulate and pass between bodies and are therefore difficult to capture by conventional methodology. Affect thus arises in the midst of in-between-ness, in the capacities to act and be acted upon (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010: 1).

The frequently cited difference between emotion and affect is that emotion refers to a sociological expression of feelings while affect is more firmly rooted in biology/neuroscience and a physical response. In this model, emotion requires a subject while affect does not. Kavka, who applies ideas of affect to Reality TV, argues in a similar fashion that affect is the zone of potential emotions, which have not yet been perceived as such, a ‘primordial soup’ of feeling (2008: x). Affect is therefore both more and less than emotion since it covers the whole range of feelings before they have been assessed or identified in relation to a particular object or source (2008: 29). In her discussion of ‘affective practice’, Wetherell talks about an unarticulated hinterland of possible semiotic connections. She argues that what we do is non-conscious in the sense that these possible meanings and significances exceed what can be grasped or articulated at any particular moment (2012: 129). These webs of semiotic connections, she argues, are ‘genuinely psychosocial’, dependent on shared languages, cultural 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.