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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 in the Berlin underworld. This cross-fertilisation of ideas around emotion, suggestion and contagion within the creative arts at the turn of the century clearly foreshadowed the development of Public Relations, which would make such an impact during World War I, and subsequent debate about the ability of mass media to manipulate audiences – whether it be the Hollywood dream industry criticised by exiled German academics from the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s or the cultural theorists of the post-World War II era.

But as the French newspaper headline ‘The Dangers of Hypnotism’ suggested, the tide was also turning against emotion to see it as a dangerous threat to social cohesion. Sociological and philosophical developments started to reflect more fully the scientific theories that had emerged from Newton and Darwin and placed an emphasis instead on empirical facts as the key to reality and truth (Boudana, 2011). This had been typified by the views of the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who, in 1859, identified the capacity of news to whip up emotions, considering it a danger to democracy. Similar scepticism was voiced in France, where the physician Gustav Le Bon and sociologist Gabriel Tarde were formulating their theories on the crowd, publics, suggestibility and irrationality. Le Bon, who considered the late 19th century to be an ‘era of crowds’, saw individuals as losing their identity and ability to act responsibly in a crowd. Thus, an individual in a crowd was for him driven by suggestion and instinct rather than reason in a state he likened to hypnotism (Borch, 2006). Le Bon’s concept of the crowd clearly owed much to a contemporary fear of the 1789 French Revolution and represented the crowd in part as a destructive force that society’s elite had previously been able to direct (Muhlmann, 2010). Tarde, whose writings have recently been rediscovered by affect theorists, stood out in Europe as a relatively isolated voice against the trend to categorise emotion as a threat. He saw no such danger, and in many ways his theories foreshadowed the contagious nature of today’s social media, a topic discussed in detail in Chapter 5. But Tarde’s views were gradually marginalised in favour of arguments that equated irrationality with danger and rational thought with social progress. Borch (2006) argues that Le Bon and Tarde’s theories of the crowd, publics, suggestibility and irrationality were also fundamentally reworked and changed by American scholars such as Robert E. Park of the Chicago School, which rose to prominence in the United States in the 1920s. Borch argues (2006: 83):

The theoretical cornerstone of European semantics, the notion of suggestion, was severely challenged in the United States … This rejection of the suggestion doctrine paved the way for a distinctive American approach to crowds and collective behaviour in which the early European emphasis on irrationality was ignored and crowds were analysed as rational entities. This may have relieved the discomfort of irrationality but it also entirely disposed of what were in fact crucial sociological insights.

By the mid-1920s, the US academic and theoretical framework around suggestion had been fundamentally rewritten from its European heritage.