A smiling face of a now murdered child, a pretty young woman disfigured in an accident, family members mourning the loss of a loved one, soldiers portrayed as fathers and husbands, hungry people in rags take the screen at the mention of the Third World… or men in turbans and guns when its time for terrorism analysis: these are pictures that we see every day in the media’s attempt to bring “reality” to life. The essential ingredient to get any desired result is emotions!
How many times have we read a news report and felt our heart ache and tears drip down our eyes? How many times have we felt our blood boil giving rise to an unspoken hatred deep within us? How many times have we lost faith in our constitution and humanity or perhaps seen a new sun on the horizon when the world is dark and bleak?
We all have gone through a plethora of emotions every time we read something in the papers or watch the news. This is the power the media has over us all — to provoke emotions and then use these very emotions for their agenda.
As long as humans are humans — emotions will exist and be exploited. Media thrives on its readers’ emotions often sacrificing its basic principle of ‘objectivity’ for generating an ’emotional uproar.’
Objectivity — a principle inculcated in every journalism school but something easily discarded on the field. No doubt, a news report can be objective through contextual independence (ability to surf different smaller contexts and then lead to a larger inconclusive whole) but the immediacy and intimacy achieved through modern technology (24 hour news channels), when coupled with a focus on the personal (eye-witness accounts), can lead the media consumer to experience profound emotional involvement in the joy and tragedies of others.
Journalism of Attachment
The tremendous use of emotional play in news reporting makes one wonder whether it is reporting, or is it crossing over into something else and whether the media are increasingly getting involved in a moral crusade?
Coined by BBC’s former correspondent Martin Bell, “journalism of attachment,” agrees that reporters are now participants in the conflicts that they report, and we need a journalism that is not just concerned with the facts and the statistics, but with the moral and ethical issues raised by the conflicts.
This is no doubt responsible journalism. However, I have my reservations on this philosophy. How does a naive reader simply judge if the journalist is “credible” enough to take a stand and throw his philosophies around. How credible are reporters who helicopter in a war zone anywhere in the world and make instant judgments about good and evil, take their pictures, speak what sells and helicopter straight out?!
The idea that conflicts around the world are fought between the forces of good and the forces of evil exists only in a fairy tale world. In the real world, matters are a little bit more complex than that. To understand a conflict or war, you have to situate it in its full context; understand and analyse all the different factors and forces at work that have been brought bear on that particular place at that particular moment for that particular reason. It is never going to be black and white, so one needs to understand the different shades of grey before one gets judgemental.
Journalistic Objectivity: on verge of extinction?
Objectivity is the essential ingredient of journalism but absolute journalistic objectivity which is the hypothetical ability to report reality as it absolutely is without distortions of any kind; is theoretically impossible and humanely incomprehensible.
It would be naive to imagine that there is a tradition of absolute neutrality in high profile news stories like war reporting. War reporting as we see it these days is nothing short of well…amusing.
Remember the scenes we were taken to by TV cameras during the recent war in Iraq. There were reporters with the Baghdad palace behind, telling us with dramatic voices that … nothing is actually happening. There were reporters from the B52’s base at RAF Fairford, telling us with an equal amount of enthusiasm that…the planes are not moving. Even with nothing much happening there or enough information floating around, we got to hear all the numbers, analysis, suggested strategies and rent-a-general’s expert views on the subject with detailed descriptions. Not to mention the dramatic graphics, red banners of ‘breaking news,’ ‘latest’ and ‘live,’ logos, time, captions…that livened up the boring statistics. War reporting looked like another reality TV show — that glued viewers to the screen with all the nail biting and heart pumping excitement that Big Brother or Survivor could generate — waiting long hours for something to actually happen and then just being excited because something finally did happen. And it wasn’t all just boring war reporting — remember the Hollywood story of Private Jessica Lynch?
Even with such an outstanding event as a war, the news coverage showed there just was not enough news content. The infrastructure was there but there were not enough things actually happening. The correspondents had not only to cover everything that had happened, but also give a full analysis, be able to differ between propaganda and reality and sound dramatic even when there was not a real reason to. In the studio, every news report was followed by several experts prepared to give the most profound analysis and comments, detailed explanations, suggested strategies as well as possible consequences. They had to be too smart-talk about anything even before they knew the whole picture. In all this chaos…emotions were definitely stirred but objectivity slowly left through the back door.
Provoking emotions in news reports can serve as a double edged sword. High emotion can either move people to strive for change through wisdom or foster irrational outrage leading to mayhem. Grief politicizes and polarizes. People who have experienced personal loss are moved to action with a single-minded ferocity that makes change not just possible but inevitable. Remember 9/11?
Campaigning through emotional connection
Armchair mourners do only armchair advocacy-writing a letter to an editor or a cheque to charity. These actions may not seem much individually, but the combined volume of similar reaction can make them significant. The million people protesting against the war on Iraq in London is only one part of the evidence.
The media’s predilection for vivid images of human suffering and the ability to get the story to people far away and make it real is what drives humanitarian impulse. When flooding devastated Mozambique in 2000, gruesome images of people hanging from trees, filmed from a rescue helicopter drew a tremendous response in terms of apathy and donations. Contrast that with the much larger humanitarian disaster that took hold in southern Africa in the winter of 2002. Famine makes lousy television, and as a result, it was impossible to draw the donor response necessary to save lives. Remember the little boy Ali during the war in Afghanistan, the media campaign to create an emotional appeal for his plight today got him the best medical treatment possible with enough funds to secure his future. Hundreds of kids suffered during the war but Ali was lucky because the media used him as front page news to play on viewers emotions.
While recently working on a project on street children and sex trade, I realized that indeed ‘sex sells.’ Readers very intently read the story about forced sex on underage girls and simply skim through the problems of poverty and education.
Public policy in a democracy often turns on emotion more than it does on reasoned debate. The greatest impact of any medium does not lie in its intellectual ability to inform and educate but the surest path to change is through an emotional connection.
Some might argue that using media to run campaigns is not journalism but social work. But I think this is simply an extension of a traditional role of media. These journalists are in touch with their communities and are responding to their needs making this new journalism a needs-based journalism rather than news-based journalism.
Tragedies make more compelling stories if the anomaly is underplayed, and the potential danger to the audience is highlighted. Fear becomes the conduit through which the audience is engaged. But when the media is used to justify governmental actions by playing on the emotions of the public or by generating fear and insecurity in the society without any sensible debate about the issue then it is just a propaganda machine. It loses its right to campaign and this can be dangerous both for the credibility of the journalist/ media organization and the society at large.
Emotional connection is a place to start, because engaging the heart is the surest way to opening the mind. Emotional content has a place in news reporting as a means to an end-but it is not an end in itself.
And I believe that today’s viewers do understand this. Take the 24 hour news coverage. There is always something happening and with all the drama the reporters cover it with, it is no longer easy to recognize what is actually important and what is not. But the viewers’ competence to judge for themselves does no longer depend on their passive acceptance. Viewers have now started to probe into the depths of the matter, look for alternative sources of news and analysis and understand a conflict through more than one perspective.
But the most positive aspect of the hyped up 24-hour news channels is that they bring people close to important events and thus they can relate to them. I believe it makes people care about the world events more. If it wasn’t for the hype generated during the war on Afghanistan or Iraq, who would have cared? It would have just slipped by like the hundreds of conflicts in Africa and Middle East. So let the mainstream media stir up emotions and hype up events — that is their job…But let us all not simply climb the bandwagon. Instead let us all take a moment and understand what the real issues are!
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