Replacing the Public with Customers: How Emotions Define Today’s Broadcast Journalism Markets. A Comparative Study Between Television Journalists in the UK and India.

Abstract

This paper identifies three main aspects of emotional engagement in journalistic news practice and outlines moments of tension between journalistic principles and (imagined) audience expectations. It investigates the relationship between emotionally (dis)engaging elements featured in television news coverage, and the rationale behind their deployment by journalists. In doing this, the article aims to address both journalism content and production dimension. It combines two qualitative approaches. This comprises semi-structured interviews conducted with around 50 journalists across both countries, supported by a close reading of TV news. The study is set within a cross-national comparative framework of two very different television cultures–the United Kingdom and India, where debates about emotional engagement contrasts a strongly regulated public service television market in the UK standing against highly competitive commercial 24-hour news programmes in India. The study presents how journalists imagine news programmes today. By highlighting journalistic practices outside of the normative model of Anglo-American journalism, this paper also seeks to include a de-Westernizing perspective within journalism studies. The paper will show that despite defending “classical” professional principles and news values, journalists across borders consider engagement and emotionalizing elements as indispensable in linking to audiences.