In conversation with spiked editor Brendan O’Neill, the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis captured well the admixture of emotionalism and narcissism encouraged by the formal immediacy of much of contemporary journalism: ‘We’ve created a journalism that feeds contemporary emotionalism brilliantly. The Orla Guerins, the poetic Fergal Keanes — they feed it with these cubist blips of description. Dark. Dangerous. The horror. It’s very much of its time, of its emotional time. But by doing this, we are amplifying and increasing people’s emotional sense that everything happens inside their heads. We are contributing to a feeling of being trapped in our heads and our emotions and a feeling of disconnection from a more political, physical world.’
This, the journalism of attachment, the journalism in which subjective feeling becomes objective fact, reaches its apogee in the actions of BBC war reporter Jon Donnison. Seeing that someone called Hazem Balousha had posted a picture of an injured child with the words ‘Pain in #Gaza’ on Twitter, Donnison could not resist and retweeted it, with the words ‘Heartbreaking’. Which it was. But what it was not was a picture of an injured girl from Gaza. The picture was actually of an injured girl from the conflict in Syria.
The lesson is clear. When emoting and feeling become the substance of journalism, then facts, and the truth, suffer.
Tim Black, “Roll up, roll up, behold dead Palestinians”, sp!ked, 2012-11-27
November 27, 2012
QotD: The “journalism of attachment”
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