Preface to the Japanese edition: Emotions, Media and Politics
I am very grateful and honoured that my book has been translated into Japanese to make it accessible to new audiences. If you are picking it up, I’m assuming it is because you have some interest in learning more about the role of emotions in mediated politics. The topic has preoccupied me for the past decade, and under a wide variety of circumstances and unfolding news events on global, national and local scales. I started researching the topic at a time when few people thought it was worthwhile to take an interest in a topic so widely denigrated and ignored by most scholars. The book explains in detail why such beliefs were widely held. Suffice it to say, I persisted with the task, in a stubborn belief in its importance. And I was fortunate enough that my writing of this book coincided with a broader turn to questions of emotion by scholars in journalism, media and communication studies. There is now little need to explain why this is worth thinking about and researching.
When I finished writing this book in May 2018 — just over two years ago — the world was a very different place. As I am writing this in the thirteenth week of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown in the UK, our preoccupations have shifted as the ongoing emergency unfolds before our eyes in slow-motion. We have seen unprecedented disruption to the everyday lives of the majority of people around the world, and media coverage has played a more important role than ever in reflecting this disruption and the corresponding emotional upheaval it has caused. From the horror and grief of so many deaths, to the fear of loss of life and livelihoods, and on to the empathy and solidarity cultivated in the face of the challenges that we have confronted, the concrete stories of the crisis have come alive through the mediation of traditional news media as well as social media.
From the very moment the first stories came out about a new and mysterious disease outbreak in Wuhan, China in January 2019, I was struck by the emotional tone in coverage of this outbreak. In the earliest phase of the coronavirus pandemic it seemed, at least for audiences of Western media, a distant grim drama unfolding in provincial China. In an early small-scale study of news about the coronavirus, published in The Conversation on February 14, 2020, I found that much of the coverage resorted to frightening and sensationalist speculation, in the absence of known facts about the disease (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020).
Subsequently, we have seen the pandemic unfolding into a rare example of a devastating crisis that has hit home everywhere at the same time, within infinite global and local implications. With that, the fear felt by people in China went global.
I mention this in particular because, while my book takes as its premise the importance of tracing a range of different emotions, it pays little attention to the role of fear. Instead, several chapters take an interest in anger as a vital political emotion, essential to what the book describes as the prevailing emotional regime (Reddy, 2001). Fear is not the only emotion to have gained the upper hand in the light of recent events: It has, for example, been accompanied by the boredom and loneliness of those stuck in lockdown, and the grief for those who have lost their lives. And anger has certainly not gone away — over the past few months, we have seen it animating the global Black Lives Matter protests. At the same time, these protests have highlighted that questions of justice also provide the basis for more positive forms of emotional engagement, including solidarity and empathy — an insight reflected in debates throughout this book. As is so often the case, the emotional engagement underpinning the Black Lives Matter protests did not come out of nowhere, but was fuelled by longer-standing and righteous grievances over structural injustice. Media coverage of the protests highlights a prominent theme of this book: Emotions should not be understood in opposition to rationality, but should rather be understood as a rational response to prevailing conditions. When we look back on 2020, I suspect we will identify fear as a new essential emotion. It is an emotion which is perfectly rational under the terrifying circumstances we have lived through, and one that clearly deserve the attention of future research on emotions, media and politics. This also highlights the fact that our emotional landscapes can never be static, but are continually changing and shifting in response to the events unfolding around us.
Needless to say, the coronavirus pandemic and the events surrounding it should be understood as more than just a discrete news story. Rather, it is a crisis of such magnitude that it is likely to change fundamental aspects of our lives in the longer term, ranging from the ways in which we interact with others, to the ways we share information, shop, learn, protest, relax, and love. The world emerging after the end of the pandemic — and the media organisations that seek to make sense of it — will be dramatically different. Fundamentally, I suspect that future research in social sciences and humanities will be not about the pandemic itself, but about the world that arises from it. As societies respond to these changes, the emotions that accompany them, and the ways they are covered and discussed in the media will be essential to our collective sense-making.
If anything, this means that the questions that originally animated me as I was writing the book — questions about how emotions move through media production, texts and audiences — are more urgent than ever. Understanding the complexities of emotions in the media, how these change over time, and with what consequences, is a substantial task. I hope that I will not be labouring on this in solitude, but that this book will help to pry open the opportunities afforded by these problems.
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Cardiff, June 2020