Читать книгу Journalism and Emotion - Stephen Jukes - Страница 18

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 of exiled German writers, composers and playwrights – for example, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg – had all moved to Los Angeles, but many of them found the Hollywood film industry depressing (Wiggershaus, 1994) as reflected in key writings during the war period. Referring to Hollywood, Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the American film industry dominated by large profit-driven corporations created ‘dupes’ of the masses, who would mindlessly consume material (Gorton, 2009). They dedicated a chapter of their work Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/1979: 137) specifically to the Culture Industry, stating:

No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided.

This deeply sceptical view reduces the audience to a passive receiver of messages, speaking of a compulsive imitation (1944/1979: 167):

The most intimate reactions of human beings have become so entirely reified, even to themselves, that the idea of anything peculiar to them survives only in extreme abstraction: personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s highly negative views on mass society and the influence of big business help explain why the war years were crucial in the United States to the establishment of journalism’s normative values. On the one hand, this was a reaction against the power of suggestion that was believed to be so pervasive in society, politics and the entertainment industry. But on the other hand, newspapers, well aware of their ability to shape opinion from the earliest days of their history, were also keen to set themselves above the masses. Tudor (1999), reviewing the study of ‘media effects’ in this period, characterises thinking in the 1940s and 1950s as deeply hierarchical in which it was considered that the elite could exercise control over a passive mass population, with inevitable anti-democratic consequences. This viewpoint is constructed around the concepts of ‘us and them’ in which ‘the vast ordinary population cannot resist the all-powerful constraint of the mighty media although the fact of this restraint is immediately apparent to the enlightened and therefore resistant elite’ (1999: 25).