Media coverage of shifting emotional regimes: Donald Trump's angry populism

Against the backdrop of the new populism, this article takes a closer look at the role of anger in media coverage of Trump’s inauguration. The article suggests that Trump’s rise heralds a shift in prevailing ‘emotional regime’ towards what I will refer to as ‘angry populism’. Angry populism – embodied by Trump – is based on a rhetoric which seeks broad appeal through the deliberate expression of anger. Adopted as an interpretive framework in media coverage, it suggests that the anger of Trump, his supporters and his opponents is both salient and relevant to political life

Towards a typology of mediated anger: routine coverage of protest and political emotion

This article establishes the importance of studying mediated anger. It first develops a typology of mediated anger, suggesting it is performative, discursively constructed, collective, and political. It applies this typology to routine coverage of anger in UK protest coverage during a two-month time period in 2015. The analysis demonstrates that anger serves as a cause of engagement and a barometer of public feeling. It sets out a spectrum of discursive constructions of mediated anger. At one end sits rational and legitimate anger, which forms the basis for social change. Along the spectrum sits aggressive and/or disruptive anger motivated by rational and legitimate concerns. At the other end of the spectrum lies illegitimate and irrational anger. The analysis shows that protesters can be simultaneously angry and rational, peaceful and legitimate. Discourses on protest construct a commonsense theory of political motivation, whereby anger explains the desire for political engagement, but only occasionally brings about other negative emotions or actions. As such, the article contributes a more nuanced understanding of anger as a political emotion

Emotion and journalism

The era of digital journalism represents a shift in the forms of knowing – or epistemology – of journalism. This shift, I argue, has opened up new spaces for more emotional and personalized forms of expression in public discourse. In referring to digital journalism, I am interested in tracing the consequences of a particular set of developments that have occurred as a result of the “digital disruption” (Jones and Salter, 2011) engendered by the emergence of online journalism and convergence. These processes have been ongoing since the 1990s (e.g. Scott, 2005) but remain profoundly destabilizing and transformative. The changes to journalism practice that have resulted from these processes are multifarious and far-reaching, involving fundamental challenges to everything from the business model of journalism to journalism’s self-understanding and its relationships to audience

Not an Act of God : Anger in British Disaster Coverage

Peer reviewe

On the political possibilities of therapy news : media responsibility and the limits of objectivity in disaster coverage

Peer reviewe

Journalism and Emotional Work

This essay introduces the special issue entitled Journalism and Emotional Work. It argues the need for a context-sensitive understanding of emotional work in journalism profession. Contributions to the issue elucidate the social context for and the social consequences of emotional work. It demonstrates that journalists' emotional work is shaped by the changes in the industry and specific contexts in which they carry out their work.Non peer reviewe

Questioning the ideal of the public sphere: the emotional turn

This article discusses the usefulness and limitations of Habermas concept of the public sphere, on the basis of the trajectory of the author’s work. It starts from the observation that the concept has generated a rich scholarly debate on tensions between the normative ideals and the nitty-gritty lived experience of mediated publics. While fundamental norms of interaction associated with the ideal of the public sphere remain essential to the creation of meaningful debate, it also relies on a series of unhelpful binary distinctions that may be neither normatively desirable nor attainable. Key assumptions of the public sphere model include the idea that public debate should be rational, impartial, dispassionate, and objective. This, in turn, implies the undesirability of emotionality, partiality, passion, and subjectivity. In recent years, particularly in response to the rise of digital and social media, scholars have begun to question the rigid delineation of such norms. The article draws on the author’s work to illuminate how an “emotional turn” in media studies has opened up for a more nuanced appraisal of the role of subjectivity and personal stories in the articulation of the common good, challenging Habermasian understandings of rational-critical debate. This “emotional turn” constitutes an essential resource for theorizing public debate as it unfolds within a hybrid media system, for better and for worse. The article shows how the “emotional turn” has shaped the author’s work on mediated public debate, ranging from letters to the editor and user-generated content to Twitter hashtags and the “emotional architecture” of Facebook

The Chicago School and ecology: A reappraisal for the digital era

This article suggests that the Chicago School’s use of ecological metaphors has much to offer scholars interested in the complexities of the contemporary media environment. The article opens by considering how the use of ecological metaphors enabled the Chicago School to build an empirical and progressive approach to the study of human forms of organization. It then traces how the use of ecological metaphors has evolved in subsequent scholarship on media and communications. It examines the interest of media ecology scholars in the environment created by technologies, and discusses how proponents of actor network theory have expanded the view of networked actors to encompass technologies, objects and human agents. The article subsequently traces a more recent proliferation of ecological metaphors as a way of understanding globalized and networked media practices. This approach, in turn, enables the reconfiguration of questions around the relationship between media, democracy and citizenship. The paper ultimately suggests that the use of ecological approaches enables scholars to pay attention to the complexities of networked interactions in communities that are geographically bounded but globally connected. This, in turn, points the continued importance of grounded, nitty-gritty empirical work tracing the variety of communicative practices within particular communities, and the ways in which these practices are shaped by relationships between a variety of actors within and beyond these communities