From moral panic to pity: empathetic discourses in newspaper campaigns Jen Birks Newspapers like to claim the moral high ground. Of course most, if not all, journalists understand their democratic role to be that of holding our political representatives and others to account by uncovering their wrongdoing, whether through incompetence or mendacity, and especially in the service of self-interest. Several investigative journalists worked hard on uncovering the details of MPs’ expenses system by scouring documents, putting in FOI requests, and challenging court rulings. However, none of them got the final scoop, which came from a leak. Daily Telegraph journalists will argue that the methods are not important, but the public interest outcome. The point is to place pressure on politicians and demand a resolution to the problem. Interestingly though, investigations into politicians’ behaviour generally focus on their personal qualities (honesty, trustworthiness, likeability) and their professional rivalries and status (or ‘authority’ currently in relation to Gordon Brown and Michael Martin), whilst performance on policy and social issues is limited to calls for more ‘tough’ penalties for crime and disorder, focusing more on the transgressions of deviant individuals than the effectiveness of the system. This kind of moralising is suggestive of what scholars such as Stanley Cohen and Stuart Hall termed ‘moral panics’, whereby new or growing social problems are framed as symbolic of moral decline and a threat to social cohesion through the decline of dominant norms. Social problems are therefore understood as caused by deviant individuals who are demonised and labelled as ‘other’.
It is often when journalists and editors see themselves uncontroversially on the side of right that they launch a dedicated campaign condemning such deviant behaviours. Newspaper campaigns could therefore be interpreted as moral panics – as socially regressive, acting in the service of the status quo rather for progressive change, even when addressing social issues. Certainly the campaigns in the Scottish tabloid press over the last decade demonstrate a continued appetite for othering discourses. The Daily Record has variously represented drug (principally heroin) dealers (November 2000 to May 2001), loan sharks (June to October 2002) and ‘anti-social’ youths (September 2003) as outside or beneath mainstream civilised society. The Record applied adjectives to drug dealers such as ‘‘vile’’, ‘‘sickening’’, and ‘‘sadistic’’, describing them as lacking in human empathy, as did sources such as an MP (Ian McCartney) whose son had died following a heroin addiction, who described them as ‘‘ruthless,
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vicious, soulless’’, and another affected individual explicitly referred to dealers as ‘‘not human’’. Similarly, loan sharks were othered by accusing them of ‘‘cruelty and callous contempt’’ for their fellow humans, and describing them as ‘‘tormentors’’, and antisocial youths were described as ‘‘vile’’ and ‘‘vicious’’. In the anti-social behaviour campaign, the most moralistic and intolerant statements were expressed in letters to the editor, describing youths as inhuman and unsocialised – ‘‘how long before we’re rid of these animals’’; ‘‘it’s time for this scum to toe the line’’; ‘‘[they] make me sick to my stomach’’. Deviant figures were also described in occult terms – drug dealers were casting an ‘‘evil spell’’ and as many as 79 other references were made to ‘‘evil’’ in the drugs campaign, 44 of which were specifically directed at dealers – the others more vaguely referring to drugs or ‘‘this evil’’; loan sharks were also frequently described as ‘‘evil’’, and ‘‘wicked’’. Interestingly, however, journalists at the newspaper were entirely conscious of the criticisms of such discourses, though their defence of the practice was explicitly rooted in imagined dominant values and beliefs. We were criticised and the politicians were criticised for using the word
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‘ned’, thereby demonising people. I think to be honest it was . . . it is entirely justified for a newspaper to use the language which its readers use, you know, provided that . . . you know, you are putting it in context and treating the story responsibly, which I think we did. [ . . . ] I mean I understand why language is important, but in this instance I think it was . . . I think we were talking in a perfectly normal language for people. (Daily Record journalist) This is a clear example of journalists claiming to take their lead from their imagined public, and speak in what they judge to be readers’ own language, what Hall and colleagues called the ‘‘public idiom’’, arguing that such language was in fact a way of naturalising the views of elite sources. Interestingly, the largely working class readership were not expected to feel targeted by the insult (in the way that a minority ethnic readership certainly would of a racial slur). Conversely, aspirant working classes may choose to adopt such terms to distance and distinguish themselves from other sections of the community. Though it is a prejudicial generalisation, it is a cultural one that individuals can reject in terms of their own identity (even if ascribed the label by others).
Though Daily Record journalists recognised a danger in ‘‘pontificating’’ against people, they were also conscious of needing an unambiguous explanation of problems and an attainable solution. One journalist at another popular Scottish title argued that it was the audience that needed a clear perpetrator. Campaigns are always good when they’ve got baddies. Baddies are good, in my view. People accuse us of personalising things, but ultimately things happen because people make them happen. You know what I mean. You’ve got a campaign against world poverty, but you would have to say that there are people who are responsible for it, whatever . . . people can be blamed for people starving, people do that. You have to have baddies. People understand baddies, people focus on baddies. (Evening Times journalist) Clearly, then, as with the moral panics of the 1960s and ‘70s, structural factors were overlooked, played down, or seen as themselves the fault of particular individuals. In the antisocial behaviour campaign, it was the then First Minister, Jack McConnell, who explicitly rejected an understanding of the issue in relation to poverty and deprivation, arguing that it was ‘‘not an excuse’’. Anti-social behaviour was caused by ‘ned culture’ according to the Daily Record, and the lack of a ‘culture of respect’ in the politicians’ terms – by intrinsically ‘bad’ individuals, deviant culture and a lack of socialisation. Even when campaigning on social issues, then, newspapers cling to the myth of agency The tabloid campaigns generally assumed that readers and citizens wanted to have their own values and instinctive feelings reconfirmed (and it was also people’s ‘feeings’, not considered opinions, that the newspaper claimed to represent). Journalists also assumed that those instincts were predominantly self-interested and individualistic – motivated by fear of others and defence of private property and interests. In contrast, though, some campaigns have emphasised positive moral principles of social responsibility, largely through evoking empathy with those affected. Several British local newspapers have run campaigns in support of local asylum-seekers, such as the Bolton Evening News’ ‘Let them stay’ campaign in 2006 on behalf of the Sukula family from the
Democratic Republic of Congo. The Guardian (‘In our backyard, yes please’, 09/01/06) reported other examples from Yorkshire, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool. In Scotland, it was The Herald who led the charge on the case of the Ay family, Kurdish asylum-seekers from Turkey in 2005. The resulting campaign, ‘Dungavel: Scotland’s Shame’ failed to prevent the Ay family from being deported, but continued to highlight the punitive treatment of children held in detention centres, the prison conditions and poor standard of education, the harsh treatment of mothers who took food to feed their young children in their cell. The fear, anxiety and tearfulness of the children was frequently described in the campaign, often in their own words, especially in relation to arrest and deportation – 14 year old Beriwan Ay described how she and her siblings were ‘‘nervous and scared’’ of the guards and were separated from one another as they were deported (HD 08/08/03), and 10 year-old Kostya Loban recounted the frightening ‘dawn raid’ by a uniformed arrest team to take his family to Dungavel: ‘‘I was scared [ . . . ] They wouldn’t let me take pictures, my toys or my pencils’’ (HD 17/10/03). However, the tabloids have also demonstrated this tendency toward eliciting empathy through contextualisation of the issues in terms of the personal experience of those directly affected. Indeed, arguably they are more comfortable doing so, since this is simply another aspect of the news value of personalisation: where there are ‘baddies’, there are also victims. In the very same campaigns as mentioned above, there were relatively progressive discourses eliciting empathy for groups that could be seen as outsiders, such as drug-users. The drugs campaign explicitly stated the personalised angle: ‘‘the human face of the devastation caused by the evil of drugs [ . . . ] they had shattered an entire family’’ (DR 02/03/ 01), and the reaction was expected to be one of sympathy. A story about a woman whose son died after taking methadone began, ‘‘WARNING If you have tears . . . prepare to shed them’’ (DR 23/02/01), explicitly stating the expected emotional response of readers, and implying that to have no tears was to be coldhearted. In an interview, a teacher argued for the personalisation of (child) victims as a way of humanising them.
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And when people see these addicts in the street what do they think – scumbag, lowlife? I don’t – I still see a human being because I think until the day they are buried these are still our children and they are not yet lost to us. (DR 27/02/01) This is precisely the opposite of the dehumanising personalisation of the dealers. Perhaps drug-users were treated sympathetically in the Record’s campaign at least in part because the campaign was dependent on ‘victims’ as sources for continuing stories, predominantly parents of drug-users who had died in drug-related circumstances. This contrasts with the broader anti-social behaviour campaign, where neighbours – increasingly unlikely to be known to the local youths in question – were the main sources. However, the framing as deviant others was replaced by a depiction of drugusers as tragic, helpless victims – not of the systems or structures of society, but of other people – the drug dealers.
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The Record, assuming that readers would blame users for their decision to take drugs, endeavoured to minimise this interpretation, not by explicitly challenging it, but by denying the agency of users entirely. The blamelessness of drug-users and loan shark debtors was often set against the culpability of ‘baddies’, dealers and loan sharks were metaphorically described as predators – ‘‘preying’’ on victims and looking for ‘‘easy prey’’. The term ‘loan sharks’ in itself is an animal metaphor suggesting predatory behaviour, and others invoked were those who live off their hosts – ‘‘parasites’’, ‘‘bloodsuckers’’, and ‘‘leeches’’, and there was also one disease metaphor – ‘‘a cancer within our communities’’ (from a senior policeman). The infantilising passivity was reinforced by a focus on children and young people as intrinsically vulnerable and not responsible for their actions: ‘‘kids this young, who quickly fall down the slippery slope into drug addition, are easy prey’’ (DR 05/12/00), ‘‘teenagers in their community fall under Munro’s evil spell’’ (DR 05/12/00).
Passive syntax and lack of semantic agency was common in relation to drug use; in particular there were 24 instances of the construction ‘‘[victim] [verb in past tense] by drugs’’, including having been ‘‘blighted’’, ‘‘ravaged’’, and ‘‘killed’’ by drugs, with ‘drugs’ as the subject in the sentence – the agent – and users as affected participants. It was largely the journalists, but also politicians, celebrities and officials, who used this sentence construction to place blame on drugs rather than drug users. In comparison, there were 11 instances of active syntax with the drug users as the subjects (‘‘take(s) drugs’’ or ‘‘use(s) drugs’’ or other tenses), eight of which were quotes from affected individuals, and five of them were either negative (denials) or in the conditional tense. The drug-users themselves remained silent in the campaign, with the exception of one ‘‘professional’’ woman who was a fairly functional heroin user (DR 31/03/01), and a few ex-users who were quoted emphasising their rejection of drugs, that they were ‘‘determined never to touch drugs again’’ (DR 02/12/00). However, no-one acknowledged that drug-users may have reasons to take that choice, as an almost rational, or at least understandable, response to their circumstances. Are there problems then, with this empathetic moral framing as there are with the censure of moral panics?
In the sociology of emotion, the personalisation of social issues can be seen as positive, arousing ‘communities of feeling’ and associated bonds of solidarity. Journalists talked about getting readers and consequently politicians to ‘‘care’’ about the experiences of those affected, and therefore be motivated or even obligated
to do something – in the politicians’ case to respond to sympathetic (or fearful) ‘public feeling’. However, the association of the moral with the emotional (and therefore non-rational or borderline rational, though not necessarily irrational) can distance the notion of the moral from a more rational moral reasoning or substantive principle. Some scholars have argued that emotional framing can be sensationalist and sentimental, what Bob Franklin refers to as ‘Newszak’. At The Herald, journalists were wary of the emotional framing, and particularly thought that the tabloid assumption that the readers only engage with issues emotionally is patronising, and one that The Herald should rise above. You need to illustrate the human side to things, and there’s a human aspect to every story, you know, and I don’t argue that’s not an important aspect of it. If you can’t show what effect something’s having on people’s lives, then why are you writing about it, you know. I mean I think to say, things are often presented in the abstract and it’s a journalist’s job to actually pin that down and say . . . right what this means is, you know, asylum seekers getting dragged into detention centres at gunpoint, you know, all these kind of run of stories. There’s a kind of personal aspect that I think is the right thing to highlight, and there’s an inherent danger, I think given the trend of the last few decades, to emphasise the personal at the cost of the political, which is just a case of pushing it too far. I think that’s a consequence of tabloidisation of news and I think in a sense we’ve succumbed to that, not altogether, but there was an aspect of that, in the Dungavel campaign. (Herald journalist) This could be interpreted as suggesting that the personal is apolitical and illustrative, but it could also be seen as recognition that it is not enough to be against suffering – a political approach attempts to change thing for the better. However, the limited effectiveness of the campaign (in the short term at least) was explained as the lack of empathy on the part of the readership, which might have been different if ‘‘they’d been locking up every second child of
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every Scottish family’’. One reporter furthermore attributed this to a perception of the family as guilty of breaking immigration rules and therefore as undeserving. Our mistake was that we banged the drum for this one family, without... I don’t think their case was strong enough to do what we wanted them to do. We were using them for political ends, and there’s always an aspect of that, let’s not be naive about that, but their case was not strong enough to do what The Herald wanted to do with them. And that was just, it’s never perfect, but that was a problem. And our asylum reporting became about the Ay family, and I think readers felt patronised by that. (Herald journalist) This suggests that The Herald’s use of tabloidstyle personalisation was not enough to overcome the very un-tabloid social issue. It also suggests that altruistic feelings or principles of social responsibility are not something that journalists believe can be instilled, particularly where blame could more instinctively be laid, and where the interests of the ‘victims’ are perceived to compete or conflict with those of ‘ordinary people’ rather than with the perpetrators. The tabloid campaigns were perceived to be more successful at framing affected individuals as part of ‘legitimate’ and ‘deserving’ publics, who were represented as being in emotional states and as passively affected by others, as politically powerless but supportive of the campaigns. The obligation of politicians to respond to the campaign demands was therefore framed as respecting these publics’ feelings and as sympathising with and caring about the affected individuals, and disagreement as offending those feelings and being ‘heartless’
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in the face of victims’ suffering. This could be interpreted as legitimate agenda-setting, but that the Daily Record also conflated the (claimed) emotional responses of such publics with certain (assumed) policy preferences. The framing of the campaigns in terms of competing interests between ‘victims’ and offenders meant that politicians were called upon to express their sympathy by taking the side of the ‘victims’, and therefore punishing the offenders. This served to suggest that sympathy for those suffering problems such as drug-use, loan shark debt and anti-social behaviour was synonymous with calling for an enforcement response. Debate on effective policy choices was closed down by presenting challenges to instinctive ‘public opinion’ as arrogant and patronising, and as producing cynicism in the electorate. Only The Herald argued that politicians should resist populist instincts, but even then the newspaper shied away from a full debate on the issues surrounding immigration and asylum, the implications of current legislation and what changes to that would mean for Scotland and the UK. Moral framing was more generally reserved for condemning the ‘deviant other’, which was thought to fit in with readers’ view of the world – what Lippmann called ‘‘the pictures in our head’’.
CBBC, Dick n Dom in Da Bungalow, 06 July 2006 Dick: Everybody, it’s Mcfly! Mcfly in da bungalow! [sound effect car crashing] McFly enter Dom: Bogies! Dick: Are you up for it Mcfly? Child guest vomits into members of Mcfly’s hair. Music plays, Dick and Dom jump into camera lens. Dom: Welcome to da bungalow, Mcfly! Dick: This is da bungalow, but unfortunately some dirty blacks have moved next door! Dom: Uh oh! Dark people moving next door to da bungalow! Dick: Sell the bungalow! Dom: White Flight! Dick: White Flight! Dick and Dom make aeroplane noises and fly into camera [sound effect fart noise] BBC News, US Election night, 04 November 2008 Live interview with Gore Vidal, hosted by David Dimbleby.
Dimbleby: You said that you expected something worse to happen, are you saying you expected the Republicans, in order to remain in power, to pull tricks during the campaign which in the end didn’t materialise? Vidal: I hinted at that, I hinted, I thought you would take the hint and not take it as a statement of reality. Dimbleby: Why wouldn’t I take it as a statement of reality? Vidal: I don’t know why you would, because I don’t know who you are! Dimbleby: hahaha well I know who you are, Mr Vidal, and you wereVidal: Well you’re one up on me! Dimbleby: Well...why don’t you go fuck yourself, Mr Vidal? Vidal: I....I don’t believe I’m hearing this, are you breaking my balls? Dimbleby: Whadaya think I am, sitting here? A fucking mirage? Go fuck your mother. Vidal: You sonofabitch, you’re a sick fucking maniac, that’s what you are! Dimbleby: You’re a fucking mumbling, stuttering little fuck. I’m David fucking Dimbleby and I take no shit off nobody. Moving on to the results in Ohio.... BBC1, The One Show, 23 March 2009 Intro Music Adrian: Good evening and welcome to the One show with Christine Blakely Christine: And Adrian Chiles
– the ones they missed
S C A N D A L
If it wasn’t for the hard working men and women of the Daily Mail, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand would be slightly more rich and less well known, tens of thousands of people wouldn’t have been offended and the world would have been oblivious to Georgina Baillie and her Satanic Sluts. The eagle eyed watchmen of the red top brigade have defended our right to moral indignation, but even they can miss things from time to time. Here the Drouth looks at other errors in BBC judgement that have slipped tabloid notice, and failed to raise even the softest ’tut tut’ sound from Mrs Granny Aspersion. Whether it’s due to bad presenters or systematic failures in editing, the excerpts here reveal the dark heart of the corporation.
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Adrian: Tonight we’re not afraid to challenge the tough topics, we’re going to be looking at the illegal sex industry. Christine: Every night thousands of women put themselves in perilous danger. [Wolf whistles from the off camera crew] Adrian: And later we’ll be talking to Zara Phillips about what she knows about the conditions of prostitutes and whores. [Cheers from off camera crew] Adrian: Have you ever used a prostitute, Christine? Christine: Well, there is a male escort service available in the sauna round the corner from my flat, and I’ve got to admit I have been tempted to go for a quick one, but so far haven’t done it. How about you Adrian? Adrian: What, order a male escort?! [Laughs from off camera crew] Adrian: You’d never catch me with a prostitute. I tie them bitches up and throw ’em into the Thames before there’s a chance of being caught. It’s much cheaper that way, that’s for sure! That’s right, old Adrian’s never had to pay for it in his life. Christine: Now, have you ever wondered how earlobes work? Dr Archer is an expert....
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