When the crisis comes home: Emotions, professionalism, and reporting on 22 March in Belgian journalists’ narratives

Abstract

On the morning of 22 March 2016, three coordinated suicide bombings planned by Daesh occurred in Brussels. Those Belgian reporters who commonly travel to conflict zones and disaster sites had to report on a ‘combat zone event’ that was happening at the place where they, their families, and friends lived. Their subjective experience of witnesses, actors, and even indirect victims merged with their professional tasks. The traditional journalistic commitment to objectivity – that is, detachment, impartiality, fairness, or professional distance – that remains to be a cornerstone of journalists’ professional self-perception and an assumed source of their authority, was challenged. The article seeks to explore the aftermath of the unprecedentedly close terrorist attacks among Belgian journalists. Based on in-depth, narrative interviews with 10 Belgian ‘crisis reporters’, the article addresses the following questions: In which sense did the reporters experience the attacks as different from other crises? How did they deal with the unusually complex relationship between their personal and professional identities? What form(s) of objectivity did they employ and (how) did their work on emotional boundaries interfere with such a norm? The findings show that the radical, ‘surreal’ alteration of the reporters’ lifeworld resulted in a fundamental conflict between personal and professional identities. In turn, their rupture but inseparability helped to shape the objectivity-as-a-practice employed by the journalists on and after 22 March.

The elephant in the newsroom: Current research on journalism and emotion

“…Seen from another perspective, the necessity of emotional labour stems from a conflict between personal and professional identities; or, as Hopper and Huxford (, p. 38) put it, “the suppression of personal, emotional identity for the sake of an ideologically driven, detached professional self.” The emotional labour is a process of negotiation and, eventually, reconciliation of the two. The closer the professional task comes to a journalist's mind and heart—for example, when a reported event involves her relatives and friends—the tougher the emotional labour is (Kotisova, ).…”

“…Barry Richards and Gavin Rees (2011) have found an ambivalence and perceived conflict among professional journalists between objectivity and emotional engagement: their interviewees talked about the "cutting off" of personal response at work or constructing a border between "the broadcaster" and "the me." Similarly, the professional discourse of Author's interviewees'-European crisis reporters-included a distinction between their personal identity and their professional identity (i.e., being a journalist versus a "human being") impressed upon them mainly by moral dilemmas faced at work (Kotisova, 2017b). All things considered, the traditional undesirability of emotions in journalism's front region follows from, as Richards and Rees put it (2011, p. 864), the historically sedimented fact that "Professional norms of detached objectivity are set against journalists' own awareness that they are emotionally affected by the situations they report on, and against their empathy for the individuals involved in the story."…”

“…The emotional labour is a process of negotiation and, eventually, reconciliation of the two. The closer the professional task comes to a journalist's mind and heart-for example, when a reported event involves her relatives and friends-the tougher the emotional labour is (Kotisova, 2017b).…”

“…Journalists' internalization of the positivist view that objectivity can be conceptualized as the binary opposition of “eye versus ‘I’” (Hopper & Huxford, , p. 33; see also Pantti, ; Tandoc & Takahashi, ), that is, as a distinction between being an observer and a protagonist, has been rather persistent. Barry Richards and Gavin Rees () have found an ambivalence and perceived conflict among professional journalists between objectivity and emotional engagement: their interviewees talked about the “cutting off” of personal response at work or constructing a border between “the broadcaster” and “the me.” Similarly, the professional discourse of Author's interviewees'—European crisis reporters—included a distinction between their personal identity and their professional identity (i.e., being a journalist versus a “human being”) impressed upon them mainly by moral dilemmas faced at work (Kotisova, ). All things considered, the traditional undesirability of emotions in journalism's front region follows from, as Richards and Rees put it (, p. 864), the historically sedimented fact that “Professional norms of detached objectivity are set against journalists' own awareness that they are emotionally affected by the situations they report on, and against their empathy for the individuals involved in the story.” As a result, emotionality has been perceived both by academics (e.g., Nord & Strömbäck, ) and in public discourse as a marker of a decline in journalistic standards and of unprincipled and flawed journalism, coinciding with tabloidization, commercialization, sensationalism, oversimplification, pathos, voyeurism (at the expense of information, analysis and context), and thus disturbing journalism's desirable social role (Pantti, ; Peters, ; Wahl‐Jorgensen, ).…”

“…Likewise, Karin Wahl‐Jorgensen () sees emotion as a central factor shaping the news agenda. In turn, the importance attributed to emotions redefines the traditional notion of objectivity and prompts media scholars to reconceptualize journalistic professionalism (e.g., Kotisova, ; Glück, ).…”