When the crisis comes home: Emotions,professionalism,and reporting on 22 March in Belgian journalists’ narratives

Abstract

On the morning of 22 March 2016, three coordinated suicide bombings planned by Daesh occurred in Brussels. Those Belgian reporters who commonly travel to conflict zones and disaster sites had to report on a ‘combat zone event’ that was happening at the place where they, their families, and friends lived. Their subjective experience of witnesses, actors, and even indirect victims merged with their professional tasks. The traditional journalistic commitment to objectivity – that is, detachment, impartiality, fairness, or professional distance – that remains to be a cornerstone of journalists’ professional self-perception and an assumed source of their authority, was challenged. The article seeks to explore the aftermath of the unprecedentedly close terrorist attacks among Belgian journalists. Based on in-depth, narrative interviews with 10 Belgian ‘crisis reporters’, the article addresses the following questions: In which sense did the reporters experience the attacks as different from other crises? How did they deal with the unusually complex relationship between their personal and professional identities? What form(s) of objectivity did they employ and (how) did their work on emotional boundaries interfere with such a norm? The findings show that the radical, ‘surreal’ alteration of the reporters’ lifeworld resulted in a fundamental conflict between personal and professional identities. In turn, their rupture but inseparability helped to shape the objectivity-as-a-practice employed by the journalists on and after 22 March.

Keywords

Crisis reporting emotions journalists professionalism terrorism

Introduction

On the morning of 22 March 2016, three coordinated suicide bombings occurred in Brussels: two at Zaventem Airport and one in central Brussels at the Maalbeek metro station. In total, 32 civilians and three perpetrators were killed, and more than 300 people were injured. The bombings, plotted by a Salafi jihadist militant group known as Daesh or ISIL, constituted the deadliest act of terrorism in Belgium’s history.

Even if some Brusselians might have foreseen the atrocities, given that the perpetrators belonged to a terror cell which had been involved in the November 2015 Paris attacks, their first-hand experience deeply shook the city and other parts of Belgium. Many people were grieving – the Belgian government declared 3 days of national mourning – and facing the paralysis of the country’s infrastructure. Those Belgian reporters who commonly travel to conflict zones and disaster sites were suddenly tasked with reporting on a ‘combat zone event’ that was occurring at the place where they, and their families and friends, lived. The traditional commitment to detachment, impartiality, fairness, or professional distance, concepts used by journalists and academics to revisit and re-legitimize objectivity (Deuze, 2005) was challenged. It was no longer possible to be a fly on the wall; the journalists’ subjective experience of witnesses, actors, and even indirect victims merged with their professional tasks (cf. Van Zoonen, 1998).

Inspired by the idea that 11 September could be understood as a potential ‘instance of creative destruction’ of the mind of American journalism, in which new things can be thought (Rosen, 2011: 36), this article explores whether and how a sample of Belgian ‘crisis reporters’ responded to the unprecedentedly close terror attacks both in their normative ideas about and actual narratives of journalistic practice. I address the following questions: In which sense did the reporters experience the attacks as different from other crises? How did they deal with the unusually complex relationship between their personal and professional identities? What form(s) of objectivity did they employ and (how) did their work on emotional boundaries interfere with such a norm?

The article aims not only to add to the consistently undertheorized and under-researched knowledge of emotional labor in journalism (Peters, 2011) but also to help understand what – if anything – happens to the classic idea of objectivity (Beckett and Deuze, 2016; Deuze, 2005), in particular, objectivity-as-a-practice (Carpentier and Trioen, 2010), under the conditions of the post–11 September understanding of journalism (Zelizer and Allan, 2011) characterized by changing attitude toward the norms of reporting and accepting a more ‘human face’ in crisis reporting (Tumber, 2011: 328).

The first part of the article highlights the emotional particularity of crisis reporting, following mainly from the double state of journalists as observers and as members of the community (Peters, 2011; Tandoc and Takahashi, 2016). This section also positions journalists’ emotionality within major conceptions of objectivity. Then, after a note on data and method, the article summarizes and discusses the Belgian journalists’ narratives.

Reporting on terror, dual state, and emotional boundaries

Reporting on conflicts and acts of terror, events characterized by high levels of uncertainty for which journalists lack preparedness and routine (Olsson and Nord, 2015), has always been emotionally distressing. Recent research has demonstrated relatively higher rates of mental problems among the subcategories of war reporters, crisis reporters, and journalists working with user-generated content – in short, among those frequently exposed to disturbing images, stories, and sounds (Feinstein et al., 2015; Reinardy, 2011; Richards and Rees, 2011). The work of researchers attached to the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma or the International News Safety Institute, illustrating the serious psychological effects of the exposure to drastic content (and reality), is exemplary (Dubberley et al., 2015; Hight and Smyth, 2003; Sambrook, 2016). More specifically, the emotional difficulty of reporting on terror has been recognized as one of the potential particularities of journalism after 11 September (Sreberny, 2011; Tumber, 2011).

The psychological complexity and the danger of individualized problems may follow from the persistent paradox that journalists exist both as involved actors and as flies on the wall (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013; Richards and Rees, 2011). When identification and closeness are at play, the actor/observer paradox comes to a head, and the psychological welfare of journalists can be even further undermined (Tumber, 2011: 326). On 22 March in Brussels (as on 11 September in New York, etc.), resident journalists were directly involved in the community, and thus existed in a dual state (Peters, 2011; Tandoc and Takahashi, 2016): they were supposed to report on the events that they were indirectly involved in. Their identity as media professionals, usually constituting itself in relation to that which it is not – that is, personal identity (Carlson and Lewis, 2015; Du Gay, 1996) – gained other conditions of existence, as the boundaries between work and personal identities faded away. Moreover, since terrorism profits from media exposure, the paradox of media professionals’ involvement and detachment was made more difficult by their active position and involuntarily political capital within the emergency state: either they lend terrorists legitimacy and credibility, or they overly rely upon the interpretation framework offered by the public and military officials and experts (Falkheimer and Olsson, 2015).

Emotionally charged situations usually require that reporters – similarly to doctors and nurses, caretakers, or funeral staff – maintain the ‘right’ extent of distance (Bernard, 2008; Castra, 2004; Molinier, 2009; for journalists, Peters, 2011). ‘You cannot be swept away completely by your emotion’, Lotte, one of the interviewees in this study, said. Journalists’ emotional posture needs to stay ‘American cool’ (Peters, 2011, referring to Stearns, 1994), yet some level of emotionality and subjectivity is a necessary element of their work and professional identity (Van Zoonen, 1998; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013). The degree of one’s emotional engagement must be carefully measured – both with regard to input as well as output. Otherwise, as Howard Tumber (2006) shows, media can be harshly criticized for acting merely as ‘transmission vehicles’; at the same time, depicting the emotional face of war can be condemned for opening the door to imprecision and for ‘moralizing’.

To maintain the ‘right distance’ for both health and work reasons, crisis reporters perform emotional management (Hochschild, 1983), suspend their indexical emotional reaction, and carefully measure out their emotional engagement in the situation (Kotišová, 2017). In other words, journalists manage and manipulate the emotional boundaries between their personal and professional contexts and identities, such as health professionals, for example (see Hayward and Tuckey, 2011). Setting the emotional boundaries thus coincides with delimiting the profession (see Carlson and Lewis, 2015).

Emotions and objectivities

Emotion and objectivity defined as detachment and impartiality

The traditional version of journalists’ professional ideology, that is, a collection of shared but continuously challenged strategies and values guiding the construction of their expertise and authority (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013: 962), includes a commitment to objectivity. Objectivity – understood as detachment, impartiality, fairness, or professional distance (Deuze, 2005) – remains a cornerstone of journalists’ professional self-perception and an assumed source of their authority (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013; Deuze, 2005; Pauly, 2014; Schudson, 2001). Together with other norms and values, such as autonomy or public service, objectivity represents the core normative and ethical aspect of professionalism (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013); some scholars even argue that the objectivity norm is central to the constitution of the journalistic field and works as a privileged signifier of ‘good journalism’ (Carpentier and Trioen, 2010; Vos, 2011).

According to Michael Schudson (2001), ‘the objectivity norm guides journalists to separate facts from values and to report only the facts. Objective reporting is supposed to be cool, rather than emotional, in tone’ (p. 149). Correspondingly, the procedural notion of objectivity, that is, objectivity understood as a kind of performance and a set of practices (Blaagaard, 2013; Peters, 2011), leads journalists to give voice to each side of a political controversy and report news in a factual, non-interpretive, ‘rational’ style without commenting on it, distorting it, or shaping its formulation (Peters, 2011; Schudson, 2001), without mentioning being overwhelmed by their feelings. ‘Normally, journalists don’t get stuck by events. They report when events strike others. And it is this basic immunity from action that makes the whole regime of neutrality, objectivity, and detachment even thinkable, let alone practical for journalists’, Jay Rosen (2011: 36) writes, while persuasively illustrating that on 11 September, such a regime was unimaginable for New York reporters.

Indeed, in a terror attack, as in other types of crisis situations, traditional journalistic values, such as objectivity, impartiality, and detachment are essentially challenged (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013). The paradox mentioned above – that journalists involved in reporting on terror are supposed to maintain the defining norms of journalism while witnessing other people’s suffering and tragedies – together with the extraordinary circumstances news organizations face, might be why in times of terror attacks, reporters produce news that is subsequently assessed by media researchers as either highly emotional (McDonald and Lawrence, 2004) or overly descriptive (Falkheimer and Olsson, 2015), resembling rather crime stories than political and policy news, and relying heavily on official sources, especially police and experts (Falkheimer and Olsson, 2015; McDonald and Lawrence, 2004). Emotion is thus perceived as an intruder by some media researchers. The belief that emotion contaminates objectivity prevails also in the journalistic discourse: ‘Professional norms of detached objectivity are set against journalists’ own awareness that they are emotionally affected by the situations they report on, and against their empathy for the individuals involved in the story’ (Richards and Rees, 2011: 864).

Emotions in ‘new’ journalism

However, as some authors have illustrated, even the hard, objective, ‘just the facts’ journalism is not unemotional; emotionality is profoundly constitutive of journalistic narratives (Peters, 2011). Analyzing Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) speaks about a ‘strategic ritual of emotionality’ and suggests that ‘there is an institutionalized and systematic practice of journalists narrating and infusing their reporting with emotion’ (p. 130). The ritual, Wahl-Jorgensen writes, operates alongside the analogous strategic ritual of objectivity. Other scholars have argued that, contrary to the professional mythology surrounding traditional journalism, subjectivity and its various manifestations do not contradict objectivity. Both values are constitutive and necessary elements of journalists’ professional identity¹ (Van Zoonen, 1998).

From this perspective, the one-dimensional notion of objectivity has been criticized for ignoring the journalists’ point of view and for working as an object of desire that is impossible to reach rather than as a practice (Carpentier and Trioen, 2010; Post, 2015). Objective reporting remains an unattainable horizon: ‘the ideological construct of objectivity can never be fully captured by [the everyday journalistic] practices. These practices will always evade and escape the ideological lure of the concept of objectivity’ (Carpentier and Trioen, 2010: 317). Carpentier and Trioen (2010) thus distinguish between ‘objectivity-as-a-norm’ (what journalists want to do; a part of journalistic ideology) and ‘objectivity-as-a-practice’ (what they actually do) and speak of an unfillable gap between the two.

Corresponding to this ‘affective turn’ in journalism and media studies (Richards and Rees, 2011), some media professionals have also redefined the classic idea of journalistic objectivity (Beckett and Deuze, 2016), and the attitude toward the norms of reporting have begun to change (Tumber, 2011). Not that the news has become more emotional, rather, the acceptability of involvement has become more explicit, and diverse emotional styles have emerged (Peters, 2011). Especially since the 1960s, the newly emerging trends in journalism such as ethnographic, new, or literary approaches have been advocating for the acknowledgment of reporters’ emotions as a legitimate part of their work (Hermann, 2016; Pauly, 2014), which has resulted in the occasional merging of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ news.

However, Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) claims that rather than expressing their own genuine and raw emotions, journalists ‘outsource’, police, and discipline others’ emotional expression. Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti (2013) consider the skill to mediate and mitigate suffering in the form of meaningful compositions one of the key differences between professional and citizen journalists. Likewise, Chris Peters (2011) believes that emotion management (Hochschild, 1983) is one of the crucial foundations of the job. ‘[F]inding the right balance of disengagement and nonchalance, without appearing disinterested’ (Peters, 2011: 303), crafting the right emotional posture (Hochschild, 1983; Illouz, 2007), can thus be understood as both a psychological defense mechanism and a professional strategy.

In sum, following Zelizer and Allen (2011: 2) who, after 11 September, asked whether ‘we have entered a new period in which journalism in its recognizable form has changed, a period in which trauma and its aftermath will continue to constitute a key factor in shaping the news’, we may pose similar questions about 22 March:

What, if anything, makes the experience of reporting on a terror attack in the journalists’ homeland specific?

How do they deal with the rupture between and the inseparability of their personal and professional identities?

What form(s) of objectivity do they employ and (how) does their work on emotional boundaries interfere with such a norm?

Method

Studying emotions, understood as ‘thoughts somehow “felt” in flushes, pulses, “movements” of our livers, minds, hearts, stomachs, skin, […] embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that “I am involved”’ (Rosaldo, 1984: 143) requires thorough reflection. In particular, one needs to decide whether emotions are practiced or narrated, and thus, whether they should be elicited through observations or interviews (Flam and Kleres, 2015). This article adopts the second perspective (Beatty, 2013; Czarniawska, 2015; Katriel, 2015; Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990) and suggests that retrospective narrating of emotional experience is a way journalists make sense of the crisis events in which they are involved. By sensemaking, the journalists not only enact their own environments and delimit the place of emotions in their professional ideology but also define the link between their emotions and their professional identity (Weick, 1995). The retrospective, social, ongoing process of making of one’s emotions sensible is grounded in the construction of one’s (professional, journalistic) identity.

This article is based on 10 in-depth narrative interviews with Flemish and Walloon ‘crisis reporters’,² that is, those journalists involved in covering crises or even specialized in a particular conflict region/topic such as the Middle East, Central Africa, or terrorism. In practice, these are mainly parachute reporters who often travel to cover external affairs, including distant wars, conflict zones, or natural disasters. Thus, although the term ‘crisis reporter’ refers to what the journalists usually do without claiming that it is a standardized segment of journalistic profession, it partly overlaps with foreign reporters who ‘remain a specialist group within journalism, which traditionally enjoys a trenchcoat [i.e. macho] culture … [Their] Journalism is not at the forefront of the touchy-feely culture. Journalists may report it but rarely embrace it’ (Tumber, 2011: 332; see also Pedelty, 1995). As such, Belgian crisis reporters is a group in which the tension between personal and professional identity, actor and observer, reporting on a crisis at home and abroad may surface more distinctly than in other groups of reporters covering the Brussels attacks. While for non-Belgian parachute reporters these contradictions were not particularly relevant, other groups of Belgian reporters covering the attacks might face the tensions between personal and professional similarly to Belgian crisis reporters. However, the crisis reporters’ insight allows them to compare the experience of covering the close crisis with distant ones, and thus potentially enables a look beyond the tensions that all Belgian reporters covering the attacks would supposedly experience.³ Consequently, the specificity of this group reveals how these contradictions are (not) reflected in objectivity-as-a-practice (which, in turn, reshapes objectivity-as-a-norm; Carpentier and Trioen, 2010).

All the interviews were one-on-one conversations conducted from April 2016 to July 2017. While some of them were highly intimate and personal, others stuck to the researcher–interviewee distinction (Arksey and Knight, 1999).

Subsequently, I transcribed the interviews and coded them directly in a selective manner (Corbin and Strauss, 2007), focusing on narratives of 22 March and developing and employing codes relevant to the research questions. Selected findings are summarized in the remainder of the article.

Analysis: When the crisis comes home

The four-dimensional surrealism of 22 March

In the morning, when the news about the first explosion at Brussels airport and the second one in the subway station closer to the city center came in, the journalists were just starting their ordinary Tuesdays: driving children to schools, going to newsrooms, planning their days. After that, however, the agenda of those who were in Belgium at the moment was reset:

I was at home when the news came in, and I had other appointments for the day. But I immediately came to the newsroom and I worked for the whole day. I was sitting in the studio to give all the last information, updates, because we didn’t have news that day. We were just on air the whole day. (Lotte)

The surprising and unexpected news (Olsson and Nord, 2015) disturbed the daily newsroom routine to the extent that the whole newsroom started to organically work on the same topic. The domestic and external affairs desks united; the people from cultural or sport desks went to interview witnesses and families of the victims, so that political reporters could make the ‘hard news’.

Although the crisis routine had been similar in all kinds of crises in the sense that the journalists ‘have to be there constantly’ (Louis; cf. Nord and Strömbäck, 2006), the fact that it occurred in the reporters’ own country made a difference. To them, it seemed surreal: an internationally relevant negative event that the reporters were accustomed to reporting on from afar suddenly occurred in their own country. Finding themselves in the middle of the type of event that they had previously experienced as temporary visitors, they had difficulty realizing or at least found ‘very strange’ that it was happening in Brussels:

So I was invited by CNN twice, and that was a very strange experience. Because then it’s kind of surreal. Because this is a place where I often go … It really felt strange to talk about your own country as a … Because the questions were really like a bit combat zones questions. (Sven)

The quotation illustrates Sven’s feeling of the unusual nature of the double state as both an observer and a member – even spokesperson – of the community (Peters, 2011; Tandoc and Takahashi, 2016). His (and others’) ‘surreal’ feelings and thus, emotional difficulty were determined by four ideal-typical dimensions of identification and closeness at play (Tumber, 2011): (1) the materiality of the situation and its technological circumstances, (2) close ones and fellow citizens, about whom the reporters were worried, (3) personal and intimate identification, and (4) the immediacy of the event.

First, the usual experience of crisis reporting was altered by the materiality – geographical and technological circumstances – of the situation. The space where the reporters commonly performed their work merged with a meaningful, personally relevant place:

The problem is that the airport was always for me a bit like a homecoming. That airport. Because it’s mostly my starting point and the end of my journey … You see a lot of misery, but when you come to the airport, you feel safe, home, secure, you know? (Thomas)

Thomas’ words illustrate that his dual state (Tandoc and Takahashi, 2016) was shaped by the unusual⁴ geographical unity/closeness of his home and ‘the spot’; such closeness then turned into a ‘problem’ of psychological welfare (Tumber, 2011).

Moreover, the reporters’ existence was multiplied by technology. Thomas further recalled that the first night after the all-day reporting from Zaventem Airport, he went to his favorite bar for pilots and flight attendants not far from the spot:

And the TV was playing … That was already strange. Because you were seeing yourself reporting on a place which was only half a mile away, [and] you were still there … So it was like becoming all one.

Due to their existing international networks and experience with global crises, other interviewees, besides reporting on the attacks, became objects of others’ reporting, which disturbed the outer boundaries of the profession (Carlson and Lewis, 2015). Sven turned into a talking head (see above). Ben was helping US journalists to find their way around Molenbeek, a neighborhood where he and the perpetrators lived. This experience of unification seemed to reach an uncanny extent at which it appeared to transcend reality: ‘So many worlds. This is my world’, said Sam.

The role of the technology in shaping the sense of the surreal is crucial; Charlie Beckett and Mark Deuze (2016) have identified a similar kind of surreal, magical, even wonderful experience emerging from the ubiquitous and networked character of news. Contributing to the merging of an individual’s personal and professional social worlds and contexts may be one of the ways new media technologies help to multiply interpretations of objectivity (see Deuze, 2005).

Second, for the interviewees, the difference from ‘just another bombing’ that they usually cover further afield (Lotte) resided in the emotional closeness to people who were directly or indirectly affected, such as children, friends, parents, siblings, and their perceptions:

[I]t’s very different, because I have a family and I have two children who go to school in Brussels, so my son was here, my little daughter just had a school trip, a tour of Brussels, and the whole school was actually in the metro. (Sven)

All of them were also well aware of their active role in the construction of narratives about the attacks, the perpetrators, and the victims, and thus, of their political authority within the community. Moreover, they were well aware of the construction mechanisms of terrorist organizations occurring through various media (e.g. Falkheimer and Olsson, 2015). Finding themselves in the middle of the struggle among narratives meant that their incentive to produce the best possible news (McDonald and Lawrence, 2004) further resonated with the emotions they felt as Belgian citizens and inhabitants of Brussels. For example, Sven and Sam were frustrated when their analytical accounts were misinterpreted or misunderstood:

It’s like a puzzle. Many pieces of the puzzle, as many as you can, different angles, different views. What is affecting me, or touching me, is when … they don’t treat it with proper respect … A war zone, even for me, is less tiring than that. Because this is part of my own society. (Sam)

Both the social and the material dimensions of closeness and identification constituted membership in the imagined community of Brusselians/Belgians sharing the trauma and the not-so-imagined community of family members or neighbors (Anderson, 1991; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2008). The combination of the material context and social ties thus significantly intensified the surreal duality of the journalists’ existence as observers and as community members (Peters, 2011; Tandoc and Takahashi, 2016), and thus, challenged the border between their personal and professional identities (Alsup, 2005; Du Gay, 1996; Van Zoonen, 1998). Since the identity of (media) professionals constitutes itself in relation to personal identity (Du Gay, 1996), their socio-materially mediated unification also questioned the journalists’ fit within professional boundaries (Carlson and Lewis, 2015).

Third, the particularities resulted in bodily feelings of fear, worry, and anger. This third dimension of identification, the fully personal and intimate one, interfered in professional identity the most (Alsup, 2005; Tumber, 2011):

I recall March 22. That day, I was working in shock in the medical sense of the word, even. I didn’t expect … Because as a journalist, of course, we are used to reporting the crises; that’s even our job description. Wars, etcetera, etcetera. We’re used to that. Then, suddenly, it happens in your own city. That’s completely different. (Jacob)

Jacob’s experience – significant because of his ability to compare it with covering distant crises – resembled that of Kate Adie, a reporter covering Northern Ireland, who recalled that threats issued in her own language were far more frightening than threats delivered in a foreign language by people who look different (Tumber, 2006). Likewise, Sven recalled that it was ‘too much’ when, a few days after the Brussels attacks, he was asked to write an article about the first Belgian Daesh fighter who killed somebody execution-style and he needed to watch the Daesh video:

I mean, it’s horror, it’s horrible. And then I watched it, and that felt like the information was too big, too much … Of course, it was the killing of the person, but also … Originally, I am from Antwerp. It was also his accent … The accent of my schoolmates.

Hearing the accent laid bare the paradox of detachment from and involvement in the situation (e.g. Richards and Rees, 2011) and hindered Sven from maintaining the right distance (e.g. Bernard, 2008).

Interestingly, some others were not astonished and talked instead about confirmation of their predictions, or even spoke about ‘release of tension’ in their Brussels newsrooms. The difference and force of the moment resided (as in the fourth ideal-typical dimension) in its time immediacy, its sudden concreteness:

I think I was not surprised, for sure not. I just thought, oh shit, it’s happening today. (Sam)

… what we were feeling for years just happened. And we knew what exactly the form that it took was … It just concretely happened, and you just said, ‘Uff, OK. So we work’. (Nicolas)

After the vague constant threat and anxiety condensed into a concrete attack, the journalists found relief in the clear task that had landed in the newsroom.

The rupture and inseparability of professional and personal

The previous section illustrated that reporting on terror close to home resulted in the journalists’ stronger identification and closeness (cf. Tumber, 2011). At the same time, their tasks needed to be performed despite the emotional thrill of the moment; thus, the work itself forced (or helped) the reporters to avoid fully realizing the tragedy and to suspend their feelings. Nicolas recalled the effect of the sudden workload on his colleagues:

[My colleagues in the newsroom] felt that the risk was higher, but at the same time they had an overload of work to do, so they were … I can just say they were de-stressed. (Nicolas)

This section further explores the intensified complexity of personal/professional dichotomy and asks how the reporters dealt with it, by investigating three different perspectives of the ambiguity but inevitable fusion of personal/professional: (1) contradiction and conflict, (2) absorption of personal identity by the professional one (or vice versa), and (3) reconciliation. These can be read either as coping and working strategies, or as acts of the personal/professional drama.

Contradiction

Interestingly, the division was clear in the narration of Jesse, who, when asked about the attacks, gave a smile of apology and recalled how frustrating it was that on 22 March he was in Egypt:

Because you wanna be where the news is. Especially as a conflict reporter. I always go to the places where things happen. […] Yes, of course, as a journalist, you think, oh God, I should be in Brussels. But of course, as a human being, as a colleague of people, as a brother, … You think, oh, this is not good.

Admitting that such an event is professionally/intellectually attractive and absorbing (‘That’s the stuff why I am a journalist’, Jacob said), because it allows one to become immersed in the complexity of the world, was a typical way of bringing up the rupture between the personal and the professional.

A similar contradiction was apparent in Thomas’ narrative, who was in the opposite situation from Jesse, starting to report from Zaventem Airport only half an hour after the bombs exploded. Thomas said that he was not able to de-connect from the professional task as when he reports on another attack in Europe, so that after working for 10 days in a row with little sleep, he had to go to his parents’ house at the seaside to have some rest.

Absorption

However, Thomas also recalled that he used his personal emotions – that he felt as a Belgian citizen, an inhabitant of Brussels, a colleague, a friend, and so on – as fuel that made it possible to keep going for those 10 days. In this sense, the personal identity was utilized by the professional one and, as a consequence, absorbed by the latter (Du Gay, 1996; Hochschild, 1983; Illouz, 2007), which came before the former: ‘[O]f course, in the case like that, it’s the journalist who takes over’ (Jesse).

Although such a professional ‘takeover’ was not that explicit in the rest of the stories, even those who talked about the emotional shock and the worries about their children clearly pointed to a kind of power or pressure of news production that controlled their action and emotion (Jacob ‘had to withhold’ the closure of his children’s school, Thomas ‘blocked out’ his anger, etc.). If they had not been primarily professionals, they would not have been ‘useful’. Sven, Jacob, Nicolas, and Sam compared themselves with doctors or emergency workers who also ‘can’t say no’ and ‘have to do what [they] have to do’ (Sam), that is, keep the right distance (Bernard, 2008; Castra, 2004; Molinier, 2009). This interpretation seemingly contrasted with that of Jay Rosen (2011: 42), who observed that after 11 September, ‘[w]ork as a journalist became a specific way of being a patriot: an American first, a professional after that’. The American press’ observer-hood, Rosen says, gave way; in the case of some of the Belgians, it appeared to be the opposite case. But since their professionality – keeping one’s emotions at bay (Illouz, 2007), working on professional boundaries (Wiik, 2015) by setting emotional ones (Hayward and Tuckey, 2011), and not breaking down to be useful and responsibly provide service to the public (Deuze, 2005; Plaisance and Skewes, 2003) – was a way of being a ‘useful’ citizen, both the American and the Belgian case suggest the supremacy of the body politic when ‘drastically changed working conditions … have some influence on how journalists regard their role’ (Wiik, 2015: 129). This makes the view that ‘the journalist takes over’ rather simplistic.

Nevertheless, taken together, the narratives show that regarding journalistic practices, professional identity was indeed given priority, which was also apparent from the sometimes hesitant technological way of thinking through the newsmaking process and the organizational efficiency: ‘It’s a bit silly to say that, but the newsroom never works better than in such a kind of crisis’ (Jacob).

Likewise, as Schudson (2011) puts it, on and after 11 September, ‘The terrible tragedy for the world proved a great opportunity for journalism’ (p. 46). In the case of the Belgian attacks, some of the reporters recalled that it was easier – linguistically closer and less dangerous – to report from Brussels. For media organizations, and correspondingly, for professional/organizational identities (Du Gay, 1996; Weick, 1995), the terror attack was an easy piece of news, it just occurred and helped fill in the news hole (McDonald and Lawrence, 2004; Nord and Strömbäck, 2006). In Brussels newsrooms, everybody was agile and ready to give a helping hand, so the collective worked perfectly. This is particularly remarkable when compared to Eva-Karin Olsson and Lars Nord’s notion of crisis as an event for which journalists lack preparedness and routine (Olsson and Nord, 2015). Moreover, the attacks helped resolve the everyday competition between digital and paper versions of newspapers, as they clearly distinguished the respective roles (following minute-to-minute developments vs bringing contextual analyses; cf. Reinardy, 2011).

Reconciliation

At the same time, however, Jacob, being assigned to write the first-level analysis on the same day, said how demanding the crisis regime was for him as an author: ‘And it was … the most difficult article I have ever written for a newspaper. I just couldn’t … get rid of my head’.

Jacob and some others found it exceptionally difficult to separate this ‘human’, emotional side connected to his personal identity, and the technological, rational, analytical features of his professional identity (Van Zoonen, 1998; cf. Du Gay, 1996). The solution he found was to reconcile them, and in his article, to combine rational analysis with his own emotional experience:

If I just wrote the kind of things about what went wrong in the society that made possible what happened in Brussels, just those rational elements, it just wouldn’t feel right, because there was some personal involvement as well. And if I wrote only about this personal emotional level, I wouldn’t do my job … I found relief that I found the way to write my story of the crisis. (Jacob)

It was important for most of the journalists to find not only the right distance (e.g. Bernard, 2008), that is, a relatively comfortable position within the personal-professional rupture, but also a borderline discourse, ‘in which separate personal and professional subjectivities are put into contact toward a point of integration’ (Alsup, 2005: 205). This reconciliation, going hand in hand with the strategic ritual of emotionality (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013), thus worked both as a coping mechanism and a reporting practice.

A few others mentioned another kind of reconciliation that they used to apply in distant crises: making a piece of news ‘neutral like the water’ and then writing a personal article ‘telling what we were feeling, thinking at that moment’ (Thomas). In this case, the genres helped clearly distinguish the facts (or, a more analytical text) from emotion (or, a more personal one). Such a form of reconciliation followed the requirement to show a ‘thick skin’ while maintaining sensitivity to sources (Peters, 2011; Richards and Rees, 2011). However, after 22 March, Thomas decided not to follow this habit ‘because I knew I perhaps would overstep the line’, he explained. The closeness and identification (cf. Tumber, 2011) made separation of facts and values (Schudson, 2001) unfeasible.

What kind of objectivity?

I have already touched upon the question of what kind of work on emotional boundaries was considered professional. But what was the form of objectivity the reporters imagined, employed, and what place in quality news on 22 March did they assign to emotions?

Only Ben – the youngest interviewee – preserved, or rather revived and strengthened (Wiik, 2015) the traditional positivist-realist version of objectivity-as-a-norm, valuing detachment, complete neutrality, and impartiality (Carpentier and Trioen, 2010; Schudson, 2001). The nine others thought that their perspective and language use inevitably make a difference. They adhered to what Cornelia Mothes (2016) calls ‘biased objectivity’, objectivity influenced by individual mind-sets. Some of the doubtful nine, mainly Sven, literally refused objectivity by claiming that it ‘doesn’t exist’. Others maintained the norm after redefining it as honesty with the public and with themselves, not withholding any information, providing as many contextual aspects as possible, multiple fact-checking, and meaningfulness (cf. Tong, 2015). In this sense, they, notwithstanding the events of 22 March, had refused the substantial definition of objectivity and understood it rather as a set of practices (see, for example, Blaagaard, 2013).

Consequently, almost all the interviewees claimed that emotions did have room in news and reports ‘if they were genuine’⁵ (Thomas) because they were one of the facts and their ‘right dose’ (Sven) or ‘a layer’ (Nicolas, Jesse) added to the author’s credibility and to the ‘humaneness’ of reporting (Lotte). In this sense, personal identity was not in opposition to, but rather traded on by the newsmaking practices required of media professionals (Du Gay, 1996). Emotional labor, management, and boundary work (Hayward and Tuckey, 2011; Hochschild, 1983) is thus crucial in the process of translating the objectivity-as-a-norm (Carpentier and Trioen, 2010) into – inevitably differing or ‘imperfect’ – practice.

More specifically, like the two ways of reconciling personal and professional identities (i.e. either interconnecting their perspectives within one story or distinguishing them in accordance with different news genres), the objectivity-as-a-practice (Carpentier and Trioen, 2010) of 22 March took on two forms.

Some – Thomas and Ben – still moved toward the horizon that they thought was unattainable. Thomas said that on 22 March he tried to achieve objectivity by ‘blocking out’ his preunderstanding of the attacks and attackers, and checking the facts an extra time. Ben romantically strived for complete neutrality.

Others simply did not see the initial conflict of personal and professional as insurmountable. Its solution was to be found in combining the two in one way or another (see above). Objectivity and subjectivity went necessarily, but also desirably, hand in hand (Alsup, 2005; Van Zoonen, 1998; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013).

Conclusion

Even in the post–11 September understanding of the world, the Brussels bombings were something new for the 10 Belgian crisis reporters interviewed for this study. Although, after the attacks in France in 2015, the journalists expected that a similar tragedy would sooner or later occur in Brussels, their personal stories illustrated in what respects their experience was different from any other task.

First, the surrealism of the altered material city settings and the technological mediation, the close ones and fellow citizens, the intimate, bodily experience, and the time immediacy led to a level of personal identification with the event that interfered in their professional identity. As a consequence, the relation between personal and professional identities, that is, emotional experiences and technologically delineated roles, was highly complex and ambivalent. On one hand, professional and personal identities were in conflict; on the other hand, the interviewees found it incredibly difficult to separate the human, emotional experience from the rational, analytical perspective required by their professional identity (Alsup, 2005; Van Zoonen, 1998; cf. Du Gay, 1996). For mental health and work reasons, the two needed to be hierarchized or reconciled. This was achieved by moving toward the unattainable horizon of neutrality, blocking out one’s preunderstandings or by combining subjectivity and objectivity according to the reporters’ moral sense and clear conscience.

These two ways of practicing objectivity overlap with some of the strategies of dealing with the gap between objectivity-as-a-norm and objectivity-as-a-practice suggested by Carpentier and Trioen (2010: 323). Namely, few of the reporters tried to bypass the gap through abiding by the distinction between (more or less) hard facts and soft emotions; eight of them tried to reduce the gap by redefining objectivity-as-a-norm to approach objectivity-as-a-practice. Importantly, by reducing the gap, they also questioned its very dualistic logic. After all, the gap between norm and practice may not be as unfillable as Carpentier and Trioen (2010) claim. The practical version of objectivity (Blaagaard, 2013), that is, objectivity redefined with the use of verbs rather than nouns that the reporters both advanced and applied in practice – being honest, checking the facts, providing a meaningful narrative, giving as much contextual information as possible, and so on – may be a more appropriate conceptual compromise (cf. Post, 2015).

The second strategy, combining subjectivity and objectivity/integrating personal and professional identities, is not limited to terror attacks but may be specific to issues that alter journalists’ perception of their own role (shifting it from purely informational to explanatory, or even educative), for example, environmental issues (Tong, 2015). The case of 11 September also provides many examples of similar practices: ‘Much reporting after September 11 turned toward a prose of solidarity rather than a prose of information’ (Schudson, 2011: 49). As Skovsgaard et al. (2013) sum up, objectivity is not carved in stone or interpreted uniformly; rather, ‘the objectivity norm is open for interpretation … related to role perception in different journalistic cultures and under different circumstances’ (p. 38).

This perspective, in turn, challenges the notion of objectivity as a cornerstone of journalistic professionalism. Rather than seeing the more or less detached, neutral version of objectivity as the fixed substance of good journalism itself, especially after 11 September, journalistic professionalism could be defined by journalists’ prudence (Champy, 2009), by their ability to weigh a singular situation in its complexity and make decisions that help them to meet the values and fulfill their roles in the best possible way. And as Schudson (2011) and others claim, during and after a terrorist attack, journalistic values and roles can differ from impartiality and informing.

Footnotes

Authors note

Johana Kotisova is also affiliated to Charles University, Prague.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

Notes

Author biography

Johana Kotisova is a doctoral candidate at the Centre de recherche et d’interventions sociologiques (CRIS), University of Liège, Belgium, and Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, with a background in social anthropology, media studies, and sociology. Her doctoral research deals with the emotional aspects of crisis reporting, in particular with journalists’ emotional labor and cynicism.

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