Abstract

Today’s mainstream news agenda is likely to serve up a diet of conflict, disaster and personal tragedy. It seems as though the old adage ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ has never been more true. We live in a world of populism, fake news and polarised opinion in which feelings and emotion often dominate stories at the expense of fact. This chapter explores what this means for journalism’s objectivity paradigm, one of the profession’s key norms that has held sway for some 150 years in the Anglo-American news culture. It then examines the consequences for the public sphere and rational debate and how journalists can report ethically, with compassion and responsibly, in such a febrile atmosphere. This chapter concludes that the rise of emotion has not fundamentally changed the underlying ethical dilemmas facing journalists but that they need to be more emotionally literate and better prepared to handle the unprecedented volume of difficult user-generated material they are confronted with and today’s intense levels of public participation, emotion and scrutiny.