A therapeutic approach to news involves a heightened exploration of emotion. Including the latest feelings about events are increasingly what counts as The News. The classic Who-What-Where-When-Why news reporting formula is more likely to include Feel, ie what people feel happened, what the reporter feels happened and what people feel about others feelings about what happened. Facts are being sidelined, sometimes ignored, or redefined so that news stories are influenced by what somebody felt about an event.

Take the print news coverage of the Paddington rail crash on 6 October 1999. When tragedies occur eyewitness accounts from rescuers, for example, are an essential part of a news report; they contain the facts of what somebody saw or did at the scene, sometimes framed in emotive language. In this case, however, some eye-witness accounts appeared more like I-feel accounts. For example, a Daily Mail journalist included a description of what professional rescuers did alongside a summary of what they felt. As he wrote: “Some were so shaken, they were stumbling. Another broke down and cried. Later another police officer would say of the crash: ‘It is an unimaginable hell. Just hell’.”

The views of psychologists on what they felt were the likely feelings of those directly involved – regardless of how many coped without the aid of trauma experts – were widely reported after Paddington. According to Peter Hodkinson, director of the Centre for Crisis Psychology, "even if you are a hero that does not mean that you will not suffer any ill-effects." This is not always the case, however. For instance, the signalman who witnessed the crash was back the next day attempting to re-open Paddington train station. As a professional rescuer explained, despite witnessing “twisted and burnt metal [it was] like any other normal day, you get on with the job and reflect afterwards”. But were the news media getting on with their job?

Therapy News can end up distorting reality. It focuses on who feels what trauma and how they deal with it even if the emotion is wrongly attributed. The day after the Paddington crash, for example, Sally Cox, a firefighter, was shown on the front page of six out of nine national newspapers lifting a hand to her eye. Some reports claimed she was wiping away tears. Cox symbolised what reporters credited as the general, emotional response by everyone involved in the tragedy. However even she felt moved to report a day later that “I was not crying…I had a bit of dirt in my eye.”

Priority

A good example is the media reaction to the statements by the parents of Sarah Payne, the murdered eight year old. Mrs Payne was quoted in the News of the World that “paedophiles cannot stop themselves” and that “parents must have the right to protect their children” alongside the Name ’n’ Shame paedophiles and “Sarah’s Law” campaigns presented as the only solutions to paedophile attacks. The Mirror elevated the victims’ authority with the headline: “Parents have spoken….now we must act”. Despite their national profile, however, the Paynes are not experts in the treatment of paedophiles and offer one view among many regarding legal solutions. As Geoffrey Wheatcroft commented in The Observer, their emotional involvement made them “the last people whose opinion should be sought at this time”. The Press Gazette summed up the overwhelming emotional pressure on critics neatly: “Who among politicians and law enforcement officers – or leader writers – could look the Paynes in the eye and insist there is no need to make children safer?" Eventually even the Paynes admitted that “there wasn’t much time for us to think things through.”

The professional divide between the reporter’s independent assessment of an event and personal sympathy for the feelings of victims is becoming blurred, not least when news reporters include their experience as victims in reports as well. Plenty of journalists go public about their personal experiences, but is their own news report the place to do it? For instance, on 1 August this year, Detective Inspector Hamish Brown launched the Metropolitan Police’s new guidelines on stalking. Many TV news reports that day included coverage of the press conference and an interview with Tracey Morgan, a victim of stalking who endorsed the guidelines. BBC 1 Newsroom SouthEast’s reporter Sarah Lockett went one step further. As a victim of a stalker herself, she said: “It’s a hot issue that people care passionately about”. Interviewed in the studio, she detailed her personal experiences and provided a succinct, professional analysis of the guidelines. Yet the act of mentioning a personal experience seemed to lend credence to the stalking guidelines. Is this editorialising through emotions? According to Sarah Lockett, the national press coverage of her experience of a stalker means it would have been “silly” not to refer to the case; by doing so the audience was given “another dimension” to the story. And what of the problem of being seen to support the guidelines?” They weren’t controversial or political at all; they were just advice to people. It was more of an informational thing, that you shouldn’t confront a stalker,” explains Lockett. “There was no-one who disagreed with it.”

Perhaps the problem would seem more obvious if a foreign news reporter covering a story on Gulf War syndrome claimed, for example, he’d fought in the war and also sought compensation? Or what if a TV journalist reporting on debates about the death penalty turned to a camera and admitted he’d written a commentary in favour of hanging? A reporter’s analysis of an issue may well be impartial and clearly distinguished from an aside about their own experience, but the report is nevertheless dominated by their moral authority in having experienced something. There is a difference between a news reporter’s analysis or eyewitness account of an event offered as a professional outsider, and the inclusion of personal experience, in which case the reporter is part of the news story. This is recognised by Justin Rowlatt, the ITN journalist who was on the 12:10 London to Leeds train that crashed at Hatfield on 17 October. His immediate reaction as a journalist was to report “live” from the scene, describing how the train roof peeled back “like a sardine can.” Only later did “the bizarre transition from reporter to victim” take place as he felt the shock of the crash. He wrote in The Guardian “There’s no doubt that in a crisis like this it can be cathartic to talk about what has happened – it certainly was for me.”

Failing to distinguish between the professional and the personal means that reporting is in danger of becoming an act of emoting, and objectivity could diminish as a result. When TV news reporters (for ITN’s Lunchtime News, London News Networks’ London Today, BBC News 24’s News at One and Channel 5’s 5 News) covered the stalking guidelines story, for example, all failed to include interviews with those who “care passionately” about another aspect of the stalking guidelines and law: the dangers to civil rights.

What accounts for the rise in Therapy News? Critics argue that the modern media reflects the public’s increasingly emotional response to tragedies since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. In the past a stiff-upper-lip culture prevailed. Hence reporters were less likely to include reports about rescuers’ suffering or counselling provision. This appears true considering how train accidents, for example were reported in the past. On 9 October 1952, national newspapers reported the “worst rail fatality for 37 years” when three trains collided at Harrow and Wealdstone station. Eighty five people were reported to have died and 170 were “seriously injured”. As in the 1999 coverage of the Paddington train crash, eyewitness accounts from professional rescuers were included in news reports. Unlike contemporary newspapers, however, eight national newspapers referred in 1952 to rescue workers’ deeds of “high courage” rather than their deep trauma. All news photographs in 1952 showed people helping the injured or the mangled train carriages. Only one small photo on page 2 of the News Chronicle depicted a stern-faced rescuer helping an injured man, alongside the quote: “I wanted to cry. But instead I just patted his arm”. In 1952 none of the rescuers had their feelings scrutinised by psychologists or wrongly attributed to them.

Pressures

Therapy News reflects the priority given to emotions and those who have suffered. For example, it is the Home Office who give victims a significant role in forming public policy on new stalking, child abuse and harassment laws. In an unprecedented move, it was Sussex Police who helped organise the Paynes’ daily appeals for information, which intensified passions about the most high profile missing person’s appeal on record even though, as investigative journalist Kevin Toolis pointed out, “the true focus of their inquiries, within hours of Sarah Payne’s abduction, was a local man”. Even if news reporters wanted to be less emotion-centric today, they are often obliged to report the latest actions of the authorities which give priority to victims’ emotions.

Still, the media is in danger of exaggerating this trend by offering little challenge, concentrating on an emotional style of coverage. For example, although press news reporters questioned the inference by Sussex Police that Sarah Payne may have been subject to a sex attack by a paedophile, the police response to their questions were not widely reported in the initial weeks of the murder inquiry. Instead most news reports focused on the Paynes’ grief, reaction to the News of the World’s campaign and the anti-paedophile demonstrations. This, despite the fact that the pathologists’ report found no evidence of a sex attack.

Although nobody denies that a news reporter’s job is to treat what may be victims’ crocodile tears with caution, in practice the new therapeutic approach is allowing victims to be less criticised and more counselled by the media. The news reporter-as-therapist allows victims to recount their feelings endlessly as if lying, Ally McBeal style, on a black leather counselling couch. In this Let-It-All-Hang-Out culture, Therapy News offers an over-indulgent feast of feeling, re-playing individuals’ emotions back to us as if we all feel the same way. Above all, the news reporters’ job is not being done if emotion is dwelt upon in reports at the expense of facts and analysis. Isn’t it time to stop getting soft on the coverage of emotions and instead, start providing a higher ratio of “hard” news to replace Therapy News?