The management of emotion in British journalism

This article reports on a study which aimed to assess how much attention journalism training and practice currently pay to the idea of emotional literacy, to explore what need news journalists and current affairs filmmakers see for closer evaluation of the emotional dimensions of their work, and to outline a strategy for enhancing emotional literacy in journalism training. While focused on encounters with traumatic situations, the research also addressed emotional aspects of more mundane reporting. This wider agenda links to political and theoretical questions about the contributions of news to the ‘emotional public sphere’, and more broadly to the diverse collection of cultural trends and phenomena concerned with acknowledging, understanding and managing emotions in diverse spheres of life — the ‘affective turn’. The findings of this interview-based study are discussed under the headings of journalists’ relations with sources, colleagues and audiences. They indicate a broad and fundamental ambivalence in the professional discourse of journalism between objectivity and emotional engagement, and a striking inattention to questions about the emotional impact of journalists’ work upon audiences. The article concludes with an assessment of the scope for a more emotionally literate approach to establish itself more firmly in journalistic practice.