The strategic ritual of emotionality: A case study of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles

Introduction

Ever since Gaye Tuchman (1972) first wrote about the strategic ritual of objectivity in journalism, it has been a well-established dictum that journalists mobilize a key set of professional practices to protect themselves from the risks of their trade. Tuchman argued that journalists ‘assume that, if every reporter gathers and structures “facts” in a detached, unbiased, impersonal manner, deadlines will be met and libel suits avoided’ (1972: 660). To Tuchman, the strategic ritual of objectivity could be seen as a survival mechanism; a response to the ‘risks imposed by deadlines, libel suits and superiors’ demands’. In drawing on the idea of ritual, she referred to:

… a routine procedure which has relatively little or only tangential relevance to the end sought. Adherence to the procedure is frequently compulsive. That such a procedure may be the best known means of attaining the sought end does not detract from its characterization as a ritual. (Tuchman, 1972: 661)

This article picks up on Tuchman’s sensitizing concept to suggest that there is also what might be referred to as a strategic ritual of emotionality, which operates alongside that of objectivity. In discussing the strategic ritual of emotionality, the article suggests that there is an institutionalized and systematic practice of journalists narrating and infusing their reporting with emotion, which means that journalistic story-telling, despite its allegiance to the ideal of objectivity, is also profoundly emotional.

This strategic ritual at times draws on practices of objectivity and at other times operates in tension with them. The strategic ritual of emotionality is just as embedded in, and central to, journalistic practice as is the strategic ritual of objectivity, though it is rarely explicitly acknowledged because it is at odds with journalistic self-understandings. Unlike the ideal of objectivity, which is central to journalistic lore, the strategic ritual of emotionality constitutes a form of tacit knowledge, implicit in journalistic socialization processes and everyday work.

The article argues that the strategic ritual of emotionality does not call on journalists to express their own emotions. Rather, emotional expression is heavily policed and disciplined. Even if journalists are restricted in their own emotional expression, journalistic genres remain infused by emotion because of a neat trick: journalists rely on the outsourcing of emotional labor to non-journalists – the story protagonists and other sources, who are (a) authorized to express emotions in public, and (b) whose emotions journalists can authoritatively describe without implicating themselves. This is consistent with the practices of the strategic ritual of objectivity as outlined by Tuchman (1972: 667), who argued that the ‘insistence on supporting “facts” is pervasive, running throughout the editors’ criticisms of reporters as well as the reporters’ criticisms of editors’. On the basis of the availability of ‘facts’ obtained through reporting, journalists are, in turn, authorized to describe the emotions of other individuals. In part, facts are verified through reliance on quotes from sources. Tuchman (1972: 668) proposed that: ‘The newsmen view quotations of other people’s opinions as a form of supporting evidence. By interjecting someone else’s opinion, they believe they are removing themselves from participation in the story, and they are letting the “facts” speak.’ Similarly, in examining the discursive dynamics of news language, Peter White (1997: 107) suggested that explicit judgments ‘are either avoided or confined to the quoted comments of external sources’.

As the article will suggest, today’s valorized journalistic forms operate on a somewhat more complicated set of epistemological assumptions, yet the premise of outsourcing emotional labor persists.

Based on an analysis of Pulitzer Prize winners – supposedly the exemplars of journalistic practice – across a range of news genres, including explanatory, international, national, investigative, feature and public service categories, the article seeks to uncover the dynamics of the strategic ritual of emotionality. The article is premised on the idea that the regimented use of emotionality could be seen as a strategic ritual insofar as its correct display garners cultural capital in the field of journalism. It explores the ways in which emotion operates in these respective news genres to begin to chart out the complicated and bumpy terrain of emotional expression that journalists deftly negotiate on a daily basis.

Understanding the place of emotion in journalism

The idea of objectivity as a central feature of journalistic self-understanding and practice enjoys a long and distinguished, if contested (e.g. Hartsock, 2000; Mindich, 1998) history in the field of journalism sociology (e.g. Schudson, 1978, 2001). What is clear is that even if the ideal of objectivity had its heyday during a bounded and specific historical period (Schudson, 1978) the central practices that it represents remain in force. This article suggests that far from dispensing with the concept of objectivity, we can helpfully understand emotionality as a complement which draws on its practices and, through them, comes to be profoundly constitutive of journalistic narratives.

Proposing that emotionality is central to journalistic story-telling could be seen as both a contrarian and, in some ways, counterintuitive move. The very idea of emotionalized public discourse runs counter to received wisdom about journalism – to the way that journalism sees itself and is seen by the world. There are profound reasons for the institutionalized resistance to the idea of emotion, relating to the distinctive social role and status of journalism. This is true in several respects. First, if journalism is, as John Hartley (1996: 32–34) suggested, the primary sense-making vehicle of modernity, its self-understanding – and that of its practitioners – is heavily tied to key premises of modernity. This includes an investment in the liberal democratic ideal (e.g. McNair, 2011). In liberal theory, emotion has conventionally been seen as the enemy of reason, rationality and ultimately of democracy, even if more recent assessments have pointed to the central place of emotion in liberal political thought (Illouz, 2007) amidst an ‘affective turn’ across humanities and social sciences disciplines (e.g. Clough and Halley, 2007). Mirroring its treatment more broadly, in journalism emotion has often been denounced as a ‘bad subject’ by scholars and practitioners and has therefore rarely been taken seriously despite evidence of its prominence (Pantti, 2010; Peters, 2011). For example, the sensationalized journalism of tabloid media is often denigrated in public and scholarly discourses precisely because the sensational is perceived to involve emotion in such a way as to preclude rationality and hence serious quality journalism (Sparks, 2000). While quality journalism is traditionally seen as ‘objective’ and rational, tabloid news discourse is considered to be anti-rationalist or sensationalist, in part due to its personalized story-telling and its intention to evoke emotional responses (Connell, 1998). In this vein, Bob Franklin (1997: 8) argues that the purpose of tabloid journalism is ‘less to inform than to elicit sympathy – a collective “Oh how dreadful” – from the readership’. This argument creates a binary opposition between ‘informing’ and ‘eliciting sympathy’, through which emotion appears as the antithesis of the dominant vision of journalism as a ‘fact-centered’ (Chalaby, 1998) and rational discursive practice designed first and foremost to provide information. Other observers, however, have suggested that this form of emotional response is an indispensable prerequisite of political action (Boltanski, 1999). The work of the award-winning journalists examined here relies on precisely such an emotional response: it operates through story-telling which calls attention to larger social problems by eliciting emotional reactions in the audience and thereby securing their involvement (see also Peters, 2011).

Certainly it is also the case that journalism’s adversarial role, which is so central to the liberal democratic imagination, often implicates emotionality as a tool. For example, the indignation of celebrated interviewers like Britain’s Jeremy Paxman is central to their success in acting as an advocate for the public, insofar as the aggressive journalist comes to represent the imagined emotional response of the audience (Higgins, 2008). Similarly, as James Ettema and Ted Glasser (1998) pointed out, investigative journalists succeed in acting as ‘custodians of conscience’ through a complex but consistent chain of reasoning, which involves both the demonstration of systemic wrongdoing and the mobilization of moral outrage regarding this wrongdoing. The way in which outrage is mobilized, in turn, is by getting a credible individual affected by the wrongdoing to denounce it in public, usually by sharing their own personal (and emotional) experience. Along those lines, political scandal reporting – a related genre which is key to journalism’s claims of holding the powerful to account – also centrally relies on the elicitation of moral outrage at alleged transgressions through public denunciation (see also Thompson, 2000). Such coverage, in turn, resonates emotionally with the public and is a necessary ingredient in the moral reasoning required to understand the complexities of claims for justice. As William Gamson (e.g. 1992) demonstrated, in studying how people talk about politics on the basis of news stories, a sense of injustice is cultivated through the generation of moral indignation at an emotional level.

Theorists have long recognized the power of story-telling to explore matters of the common good and hence play an explicitly normative role. Narrative can:

… cut through abstractions and other obscurities and focus on the everyday meaning of life and our dealings with it. Stories enable us to think creatively and imaginatively about our experiences and the experiences of others; they empower us to interpret and thereby comprehend the endless details of life … [Stories have a] basic role in transforming individual and essentially private experience into a shared and therefore public reality. (Glasser, 1991: 235–236)

This is because personalized story-telling enables empathy, or the identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives. Empathy is fundamentally an emotional reaction, even as it enables rational consideration of the issue at hand (Koehn, 1998).

The idea that emotional expression has a role to play in some journalistic forms is not a new one. For example, Carolyn Kitch has demonstrated that emotional story-telling is central to rituals of public mourning (e.g. 2000, 2003). Veteran British journalist David Loyn (2003) sought to recast the debate around objectivity in suggesting that:

[An objective] approach is not dispassionate. It can be hugely passionate, requiring emotional engagement and human imagination. But it is not about my passion, how I feel. The viewer or listener does not want to know how I feel, but how people feel on the ground.

The concern for the engagement of the reading public expressed by Loyn is echoed in the work of Liz Bird and Robert Dardenne, who go even further in suggesting that compelling journalistic story-telling sits uneasily with practices of objectivity and thus fundamentally challenges core professional ideals:

[Journalists] face a paradox; the more ‘objective’ they are, the more unreadable they become; while the better storytellers they are, the more readers will respond, and the more they fear they are betraying their ideals. (1988: 78)

Nonetheless, an objective approach and compelling story-telling are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In their study of narrative practices in award-winning journalism, Verica Rupar and Marcel Broersma (2010) found that ‘objective reporting practices, in the form of allegiance to principles of accuracy, fairness, balance and impartiality are understood both as minimal requirements and attributes of excellence’. That is to say, they are rarely used as explicit criteria for awarding prizes; instead, citations often focus on the excellence of journalistic story-telling. Along those lines, techniques taken from ‘new journalism’ – including a delayed lead, human interest detail, realistic dialogue, scene by scene reconstruction, interior monologue and several narrators within the text – were privileged in awards decisions (2010).

The evidence of the coexistence of objective reporting practices with emotional narratives is also backed up by research on journalists’ professional reflections. In a study of journalists’ discussions of the emotionality of news, Mervi Pantti (2010) concluded that while television journalists in both commercial and public service news organizations were critical towards ‘emotional news’, they nevertheless believed that emotion did not pose a fundamental challenge to the rationales of factuality and objectivity (see also Ward, 2010). On the one hand, presenting and interpreting ‘relevant’ individual and collective emotions were seen as a part of journalism’s aim of representing reality, as ‘facts’ without which the whole truth is not told; on the other hand, the main objective of emotional story-telling was to enhance the political and social knowledge of the audience and hence facilitate the understanding of news (Pantti, 2010; see also Richards and Rees, forthcoming).

Paying attention to emotion in journalism studies does not, however, mean that we should uncritically celebrate emotional practices, genres, discourses and expressions. Rather, a move towards a concrete analysis of the strategic ritual of emotionality can enrich our understanding of journalism – both in terms of what it is for, and how it works.

Methodology: Studying the strategic ritual of emotionality

In particular, the article takes an interest in delineating the strategic ritual of emotionality by answering the following questions: How is emotion built into journalistic stories? Who expresses emotion? How is it expressed? What role does emotional expression play in the narrative? To better understand the mechanics of the strategic ritual of emotionality, the article examines the extent and nature of emotional expression in the most highly valued examples of journalistic writing – award-winning stories. The decision to analyze award-winning journalism is based on insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. To Bourdieu (2005: 30):

… a field is a field of forces [sic] within which the agents occupy positions that statistically determine the positions they take with respect to the field, these position-takings being aimed either at conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field.

Bourdieu suggested that individuals advance their position within particular fields (including the professional field of journalism) through the accumulation of cultural capital. In the journalistic field, the specific cultural capital ‘is evident in those forms of journalistic excellence recognized by the U.S. Pulitzer Prizes and other prestigious professional or academic forums’ (Benson, 2006: 189–190). As such, examining Pulitzer Prize-winning articles may not necessarily give us a sense of what is typical of routine news reporting practices. Nor do these stories accurately reflect the broad diversity of journalism practices in a global context, but examining them may help to identify practices that are viewed as exemplary and as models to emulate (English, 2002). The idea of looking at award-winning journalism as a marker of quality and excellence is not a new one; scholars such as Ettema and Glasser (1998), Rupar and Broersma (2010) and Ida Schultz (2006) have examined prize-winning stories and journalists to understand what counts for quality journalism, and which types of journalistic narratives are privileged and valorized within the profession as a result.

The article focuses on how emotional story-telling operates in conventional news genres. To that end, a basic content analysis has been conducted, drawing on a sample of Pulitzer Prize winners across the categories of news reporting conventionally assumed to be informed by ideals of objectivity, ¹ including explanatory, international, national, investigative, feature and public service reporting. Each category is a distinctive genre with its own conventions, but they also share some narrative features, including the use of emotional language and story-telling. These categories have been selected because they are the ones for which awards have been granted since 1995 – the first year for which the Pulitzer Prize online archive includes the texts of the winning stories. ² Given that the prizes vary in terms of whether they are awarded for an individual story, a series, or a larger body of work, the study focuses, for the sake of consistency, on the first entry appearing in the list of winning stories in each category. It means that if it is part of a series, it will be the first piece; the one which frames the narrative of the series as a whole. Overall, this sampling strategy yielded a total of 101 stories, which also provided a rich body of qualitative material for the examination of the range of strategies used in embedding emotion into journalistic story-telling.

As examples of the award-winning stories will demonstrate, there is little doubt that these journalistic narratives are profoundly infused with emotion. But because emotional intention, expression and reactions are both socially constructed and profoundly embedded in language, it is challenging to identify exactly how emotion operates in narrative, and scholars have grappled with this empirical problem for decades (see for example Edwards, 1999; Lutz, 1988).

With these complexities in mind, it is apparent that the creation of analytical constructs (Krippendorff, 2004: 177) around the strategic ritual of emotionality will be reductive at best. Further, any attempt to come to terms with institutionalized discursive phenomena such as these requires both macro-level considerations about the nature of the narrative and micro-level analysis of particular word choices which shape the discourse. Emotions operate at several levels of journalistic discourse (e.g. Edwards, 1999). First and most straightforwardly, they are at work in the use of emotive language – from the use of individual emotion words such as ‘afraid’, ‘happy’, ‘elated’ or ‘worried’ to the use of detailed descriptions, judgments and appraisals of environments, objects and individuals. Emotions may also be built into the narrative: even in stories that do not use emotional language, dramatic tension is created through a variety of narrative strategies, including detailed description, juxtaposition and personalized story-telling, as the article explores in more detail later.

In part, the creation of dramatic tension is so difficult to detect at the surface-level because it draws on presuppositions, or claims based on shared normative assumptions that are taken for granted and implicit, ‘embedded within the explicit meaning of a text or utterance’ (Richardson, 2007: 63), such as the idea that stealing and killing are morally wrong, that death is a tragic event, and that caring and loving are morally right. Indeed, Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, though dealing with a broad range of topics, are frequently premised on such presuppositions, and often deal with matters of life and death (Shapiro, 2006). Finally, at the extra-textual level, journalistic narratives are grounded on the anticipation of particular emotional responses in the audience (e.g. Gürsel, 2009).

To move towards the generation of usable analytical constructs the study used selected approaches from studies of narrative journalism and approaches associated with discourse analysis. Work in narrative journalism has taken an interest in the role of personalized story-telling (e.g. Bird and Dardenne, 2009) and the use, among other strategies, of the anecdotal lead (e.g. Rupar and Broersma, 2010). In analyzing the texts at the macro-level, these two features – the use of an anecdotal lead and personalized story-telling – were used as markers of a strategic ritual of emotionality as they have often been associated with a ‘softer’ and more emotionalized form of journalistic story-telling (see also Macdonald, 2000). The anecdotal lead is here defined as a lead paragraph which doesn’t use the conventional ‘inverted pyramid’ structure, characterized by ‘a style that conveys the most important information in the first paragraphs of a story, and one mentioned by textbooks and critics as part of “objective” news writing’ (Mindich, 1998: 13). Instead it opens by telling a brief story, usually but not always personalized in nature, to draw in the reader (Itule and Anderson, 2003: 60). Personalized story-telling is defined as a narrative form which draws on the personal experience of a particular individual caught up in a story to dramatize a broader social issue. Anecdotal leads and personalized story-telling are thus closely related but one does not require the other; there are stories which have anecdotal leads but no personalized story-telling and, more rarely, stories which have other types of leads but feature the stories of individuals.

In analyzing the media texts at the micro-level, the study borrows from appraisal theory, an approach from within the broader field of discourse analysis which focuses on how evaluations of affect, individuals and objects are made in commonly occurring genres of discourse, including those of journalism (see Martin and Rose, 2003; Stenvall, 2008; White, 1997). For the purposes of this article, the emphasis is on expressions of affect, or how feeling is expressed in discourse (Martin and Rose, 2003: 24) through the use of emotion words (such as happy, elated, optimistic, hopeful; angry, hurt, worried, ashamed). The study draws on a modified version of appraisal theory because conventional treatments tend to work with discursive instances where individuals discuss their own feelings (2003: 24), even if some scholars have sought to adapt it to more complex forms of discursive attribution, including ‘hard news’ journalism (e.g. Stenvall, 2008; White, 1997). In journalism, expressions of affect are generally rather more complex: They are often made on behalf of others, as when a journalist describes the feelings of a source (‘Judge Robert Hilder felt uneasy’) or a source describes the feelings of another individual or group (‘“They were very angry,” added his wife’). Secondly, they are frequently framed as collective emotions (as in ‘we are concerned’ or ‘they are puzzled’), rather than individual ones. Among other things, the study examined who expresses the emotions, on whose behalf they are expressed, and whether they are positive or negative. The study also analyzed whether expressions of emotion are, as Tuchman (1972) would have it, supported by evidence in the form of quotations – a strategy which provides a way to relate the story-telling strategies observed here to those associated with the strategic ritual of objectivity. It also considers judgments of individuals (e.g. ‘elders are far more lenient’) and appreciation, or the evaluation of objects (e.g. ‘bustling encampment’) (Martin and Rose, 2003: 22) as related forms of appraisal, which contribute to the building of dramatic tension through story-telling while challenging the idea of the journalist as an objective and impartial observer (Bird and Dardenne, 1988).

Where there are expressions of affect, judgments and appreciation, the first expression of these as they occur in the story, from the journalist and from the source, is examined. This is because the stories in the sample vary greatly in length – from fewer than 400 words to more than 7000 – and an exhaustive examination of appraisals would over-represent the longer stories which may well be structurally different from shorter ones. Following an informal piloting process, 51 stories (50.5 percent of the sample) were coded by a second coder, and this intercoder reliability test resulted in agreement ranging from 83 to 100 percent across the variables. ³

The article does not go into detail in analyzing the linguistic features of the texts, but simply intends to describe systematic patterns in particular news genres and differences between them, while at the same time making the general point that award-winning journalism is, across categories, pervaded by appraisal in general and emotion in particular, while the construction of emotion takes place in very concrete and systematic ways. The attempt at charting the strategic ritual of emotionality begins by examining its dynamics at the macro-level – or the level of the lead and the form of story-telling – and then proceeds to analyze in more detail the concrete expressions of emotion within the text.

Findings: Charting the strategic ritual of emotionality

If journalism has been conventionally understood as a fact-centered discursive practice (Chalaby, 1998), and the classic ‘objective’ way of framing the facts in question has been the inverted pyramid lead, characterized by a dispassionate, distanced narrative style (Itule and Anderson, 2003), the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories examined here put a lie to this received understanding. Instead, what prevailed, across all news genres, was a narrative form more closely resembling that of literary journalism (Hartsock, 2000), characterized by anecdotal leads, personalized story-telling and widespread invocation of emotion. The exemplary American journalism of the past decade and a half could be more accurately described as story-telling with a moral purpose, which mobilized emotions – directly and indirectly – to engage audiences. Across all categories, anecdotal leads were present in 63.4 percent of stories, compared to the conventional inverted pyramid lead which opened 19.8 percent of stories, while other types of leads (see Itule and Anderson, 2003: 60) accounted for 16.8 percent. As is apparent from Figure 1 below, there was, however, significant variation among genres. Anecdotal leads accounted for anywhere between 93.8 percent (in the case of feature reporting) to 35.3 percent (in the case of investigative reporting), whereas the percentage of inverted pyramid leads ranged from none in the feature category to 35.3 percent in national reporting. This indicates variations which are also apparent in other respects and signals that specific practices may differ according to genre.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Reporting category by lead type (N = 101)

The role of the anecdotal lead was usually to draw the reader into a story with wider socio-political implications through the illustration of how it affected a particular individual or group. For example, the New York Times won the 1997 Pulitzer in International Reporting for a series on life in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, after decades of war. The series opened as follows:

Before the pink light of dawn could touch the snowy peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains around this ruined capital, five young Afghans met on a bitterly cold morning last week for the gamble of a lifetime.

On borrowed bicycles, they planned to cross siege lines to the south of the city, load up with sacks of flour, cans of gasoline and bundles of firewood, and be back home by noon.

From the 300 percent price difference between the Kabul bazaars and the traders outside the city, they calculated that they would make enough money to pay the bicycle owners and keep their families from the hunger and cold of Kabul for a month. (Burns, 1996)

This lead, through the tale of the resourceful young men, framed the series’ account of the difficulties of life in Kabul, marked by poverty, war, hunger and cold, thus dramatizing the otherwise abstract issues that were the focus of the series. Such personalized story-telling featured in 62.4 percent of stories, and there was a high degree of association between personalized story-telling and the presence of anecdotal leads: 97 percent of stories with anecdotal leads had personalized story-telling as opposed to only 5 percent of stories that opened with an inverted pyramid lead. A correlation analysis demonstrated that this association was statistically significant at the 0.01 level. The expression of emotion was also widespread: 86.1 percent of all stories contained expressions of affect by journalists, and 82.2 percent by sources. ⁴ When emotions were voiced, they were frequently negative: This was the case for 77 percent of journalists’ expressions of affect and 65 percent of sources’, involving terms such as ‘fear’, ‘agony’, and ‘threatened’. Further complicating this picture was the fact that the most frequently mentioned positive emotion by sources was ‘hope’ under what were usually discouraging circumstances. For example, Richard A. Clarke, a White House counterterrorism official under George W. Bush, was interviewed for the New York Times series that won the 2002 Explanatory Reporting award. Clarke said about the possibility of capturing Osama Bin Laden that his ‘arrest, which we dearly hope for, is only one step along the road of the many things we need to do to eliminate the network of organizations’ (Engelberg, 2001). The prominence of ‘hope’ in the discursive register implies that most emotional expression calls attention to social and political problems that require solution, and that the positive emotions expressed tend to revolve around possible positive futures, rather than the present (see also Neiger, 2007). The overwhelming negative orientation of emotional expression is consistent with long-standing scholarly observations regarding the salience of news values of negativity and conflict (e.g. Galtung and Ruge, 1965) but also highlights journalists’ construction of saddened subjects negotiating a dangerous and frightening world. This may reflect broader patterns in emotional expression: Research demonstrates that negative emotion words are far more common in spoken language than positive emotion words (Bucy, 2003).

In the case of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, story-telling which is intensely emotional is clearly valorized. However, it is not emotional in the sense of journalists narrating their own emotions as story-tellers. In fact, in none of the stories studied here did journalists discuss their own emotions. Instead, journalists described the feelings of groups and collectives in just over half of all cases (50.5 percent), story protagonists in 20.7 percent, and other individuals in 28.8 percent of cases. When sources expressed emotions, it was primarily (in 51.8 percent of cases) their own emotions, but also (in 19.2 percent of cases) discussing their own emotions as part of a collective.

As such, there is clear evidence to suggest that journalistic story-telling outsources emotional labor – the responsibility for the expression of emotion contained within the news stories, and the elicitation of emotions on the part of the audience. In this, the emotional story-telling of journalism is validated by the evidence provided by sources. However, in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning articles I examined this validation does not occur in the straightforward way of using quotes as a source of ‘facts’, as suggested by Tuchman (1972). Rather, for the most part, the source of the journalists’ information remains invisible. In stories that involved journalists referring to affect, only 32 percent were based on direct or indirect quotes. Here, there were significant differences between reporting categories, signaling genre-specific conventions: whereas only 6.2 percent of feature stories and 11.8 percent of explanatory stories contained expressions of journalistic affect supported by direct or indirect quotes, 47.1 percent of national reporting stories and 58.8 percent of stories in the investigative reporting category used such supporting evidence. ⁵ On occasion (and this happened far more frequently in the categories of public service, investigative and national reporting), the journalist revealed that the stories were based on ‘months of reporting’ or ‘hundreds of interviews’ or ‘unpublished research’ but this was the exception rather than the rule. As such, much of the descriptive information in general, and the discussion of emotion in particular, appeared to be premised on an alternative epistemology to that of the strategic ritual of objectivity: it rested on the idea that the epistemic authority of the excellent journalist can be taken for granted, so that the power of the narrative and the feelings described in it and evoked through it speak for themselves, without having to rely on key aspects of the strategic ritual of objectivity. ⁶

Further complicating matters, it is also the case, as suggested above, that stories which do not directly, or only sparsely, express affect can be intensely emotional through other means. The anecdotal lead cited below opened a series of Associated Press stories by Mark Fritz which won the 1995 International Reporting Pulitzer through illustrating the devastating consequences of the 1994 Rwandan civil war. The lead used the story of a genocide perpetrator to draw the reader into the broader account of the conflict:

MUSHA, Rwanda (AP) – Juliana Mukankwaya is the mother of six children and the murderer of two, the son and daughter of people she knew since she herself was a child.

Last week, Mukankwaya said, she and other women rounded up the children of fellow villagers they perceived as enemies. With gruesome resolve, she said, they bludgeoned the stunned youngsters to death with large sticks.

‘They didn’t cry because they knew us,’ said the woman. ‘They just made big eyes. We killed too many to count.’

[ … ]

Virtually all of the prisoners recounted their horrific deeds in dull, emotionless voices, their faces a collection of impassive masks. (Fritz, 1994)

This story is a useful example of the complexities in charting emotional expression, and a more detailed examination of its mechanics is illustrative. It makes very limited use of explicit emotion words (stunned youngsters) even if it is rich in appraisals which set the scene to elicit audience emotional response (gruesome resolve, horrific deeds, emotionless voices, impassive masks) and, in fact, explicitly remarks on the absence of emotion in the accounts of the imprisoned alleged genocide perpetrators. The protagonist, Juliana Mukankwaya, likewise describes the absence of dramatic emotional reaction amongst the victims (‘They didn’t cry because they knew us … They just made big eyes’). But the emotional impact of the story, underlined by the appraisals, comes from the dramatic juxtaposition of the situation of normalcy (Juliana Mukankwaya is the mother of six children) with the unexpected event (Martin and Rose, 2003: 130) (and the murderer of two, the son and daughter of people she knew since she herself was a child), a common narrative structure which here paints a resonant picture of the horror of the alleged crime without any use of emotion words.

Along those lines, the following story about famine in Afghanistan was relatively unusual insofar as the entire story contained no expression of source affect and only limited instances of appraisal in the sequence quoted below. Yet the story-telling embodies profound emotion in its graphic description of the funeral of a young child:

Abdullah looked like a child’s doll in his perfect stillness. He was brought across the road and laid gently on a piece of yellow plastic. The father slowly tore off the boy’s clothes – the parka, a green shirt, a good luck charm worn around the neck. Another man washed the baby with shampoo, rinsing the suds with water poured from a black kettle. Dabs of perfume were applied from a little bottle. Abdullah was then wrapped, first in the shroud, then in a tan blanket.

[ … ]

When it was time to lay Abdullah in his grave, it was already after 10 and the morning had turned bright. Wrapped in the shroud, and with the day pulsing with sunlight, the baby was finally warm when he was placed forever in the earth. (Bearak, 2001)

What both of these stories share is the presupposition (Richardson, 2007) that the death of a child is a tragic event. The horror of the very idea of children dying needlessly – in one case, from the murderous actions of the mother of six children and, in the other, from starvation – serves as the consensual basis for emotional resonance of the stories. In fact, a significant number of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories drew on accounts of dead or sick children as a way of illustrating broader themes, ranging from breakthroughs in DNA sequences to systemic failures in the care system (Shapiro, 2006). By contrast, one of the stories that most extensively used emotion words won the Pulitzer for Feature Reporting in 2008 for the Washington Post. It drew on the explicit invocation of emotion to engage the audience in a story about a violin virtuoso’s unsuccessful attempt at busking in the Washington metro – one which appeared to require more explicit invocation of emotion to engender audience connection:

The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician’s masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang – ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous. (Weingarten, 2007)

Whether elicited through the explicit use of emotion words, or by drawing on presuppositions and narrative conventions to generate an emotional reaction in the audience, it is clear that Pulitzer Prize-winning stories use emotion as a journalistic tool in an institutionalized and ritualized fashion. Further, an ability to do so successfully is explicitly recognized as a criterion in the selection of winning stories. Several citations thus mentioned the emotional resonance of the journalistic story-telling. ⁷ For example, the citation for the international reporting award in 2004 justified the award given to Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post in terms of ‘his extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended’. Similarly, the 2009 feature reporting award was granted:

… to Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times for her moving, richly detailed story of a neglected little girl, found in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, who was adopted by a new family committed to her nurturing.

The emotional intelligence of journalists appears to be a valued form of cultural capital in the journalistic field (see also Tumber and Prentoulis, 2003), consistent with a celebration of a journalistic style which values the successful display of the strategic ritual of emotionality over the fact-centered discursive practice of conventional objective reporting.

Conclusion

This article has revealed that the exemplary journalism of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories relies heavily on emotional story-telling, deploying what has been referred to as the strategic ritual of emotionality. Kovach and Rosenstiel (2005), in outlining journalistic ‘emotion display rules’ in the context of disaster coverage, suggested that ‘emotion ought to come at those moments when any other reaction would seem forced or out of place’. The evidence presented here indicates that in fact emotional story-telling is a driving force behind award-winning journalism, with the aim of drawing the audience’s attention to complex topics of social and political import. At the same time, long-standing practices of objectivity create particular parameters for the expression of emotion. Emotional expression is carefully policed, but extensive, systematic and routinized. Some of the practices that comprise the strategic ritual of emotionality in the award-winning articles studied here include:

More broadly, the strategic ritual of emotionality, as practiced in the context of the award-winning stories examined here, appears to be underwritten by an alternative epistemology to that embodied in the strategic ritual of objectivity, and one that is closer to forms of narrative journalism. It means that although some aspects of the story-telling conventions – such as journalists refraining from discussing their own emotions – are consistent with ‘objective’ practices, others – such as the fact that emotional expression rarely relies on evidence in the form of quotes from sources – are not. The excellence of award-winning journalism appears to give journalists the license to experiment with both form and evidentiary basis when enlisted in the cause of making important stories come alive for their audiences.

The strategic ritual of emotionality requires emotional intelligence which involves an understanding of how to craft stories that use emotional expression appropriately to elicit an emotional reaction in the audience. Further, extensive ‘behind-the-scenes’ emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) is required to gain the rich – and emotionally resonant – stuff of which the award-winning stories are made. As such, journalism is no different from other fields of capitalist production, where emotional intelligence is increasingly seen as an indispensable skill (Illouz, 2007). It is, however, rarely recognized in either the training of journalists or in newsroom socialization. The strategic ritual of emotionality is constituted by tacit rules of practice – ones that are rarely discussed or made explicit. But more than that, it has been rendered invisible through the overriding emphasis on objectivity in discourses about the profession.

This article represents a small and tenuous first step in the attempt to open our eyes to the central role of the strategic ritual of emotionality in journalism. There are a variety of fruitful avenues for future research in this area which might offer a broader and more nuanced view of how emotion operates in journalistic story-telling. Looking at Pulitzer Prize-winning stories tells us something about exemplary practices but does not shed light on emotional expression in routine, everyday deadline reporting. Further, there may be significant differences between emotional story-telling regimes of ‘quality’ and ‘tabloid’ journalism, as well as across platforms, including television, radio and online. This article’s focus on a particular (and privileged) form of US journalism is limited in its examination of one narrow context, and does not do justice to the variety of professional cultures around the world. Similarly, the examination undertaken here tells us little about changes over a longer period, even as there is some evidence of an increasing emotionalization of journalistic narratives over the past few decades (e.g. Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2011). Indeed, the sample demonstrates no significant change over the time period studied in terms of forms of emotional expression, and attention to a longer time span would be able to uncover changing manifestations of the strategic ritual of emotionality, documenting its emergence as a professional tool. Such research projects, while beyond the scope of the current article, could go some way to redressing the silence around emotion which has for too long haunted both scholarship and practice.