Feeling the news: How young Danes balance objectivity ideals and emotive realities of news use

Beskrivelse

Two recent developments in journalism studies, an audience turn (Costera Meijer, 2020) and an emotional turn (Wahl-Jorgensen & Pantti, 2021), have brought to light realities of news use that have consequences for the idealized role of journalism in civic life and deliberative democracy. Within the audience turn, research has called attention to ways in which media-use contrasts with citizenship ideals about civic orientation (Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2018), while the emotional turn has shown audiences’ emotional involvements with news to be more varied than what is prescribed by normative civic ideals about objectivity (Wahl-Jorgensen & Pantti, 2021). The conflict between ideals and realities of news use are especially interesting because news producers and disseminators rely on the second factor, that is the varied emotional appeals of journalistic content, to solve the first issue, that is the gap between the amount of news people are interested in consuming, versus the amount that has been considered civically ideal, or for that matter economically viable for journalistic industries in the highly-digital media environment (Beckett & Deuze, 2016; Lecheler, 2020). Nonetheless, the reliance on emotion to attract audience attention to journalistic content on digital platforms has not spelled the end of unemotional objectivity civic ideals, as indeed it did not in pre-digital news landscapes wherein emotion similarly played an important role, including in non-sensationalist news genres (Peters, 2011). The tensions between practice and ideal raise the question of how news users themselves value and make sense of the much-studied roles of emotion in their everyday lives with journalism and news media.

This paper reports on the findings of an iterative study in which a quota sample of Danes, aged 18 to 24, were asked about their information seeking practices using a combination of semi-structured interviews and a card sorting exercise to prompt reflections about a broad spectrum of media types that young adults may turn to for information. Interviews were conducted in 2019 and again in 2021 to locate changes to participants’ media repertoires (Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017) and understand their sense-making of the role of emotion in their changing and changed repertoires. Like older generations, young adults have normative ideas about news use to which their actual news practices may not conform (Costera-Meijer, 2007; Sveningsson, 2015), potentially impacting their view of themselves as civic participants as well as their news practices. This paper finds that such ideals are not isolated to perceptions of more and less appropriate kinds of media, but also encompass perceptions of more and less appropriate emotional interactions with those media. It furthermore identifies efforts by participants to bridge or evade their own perceptions of emotion/reason dichotomies as they assert their civic identities along with early adulthood, while maneuvering the hybrid media manifold (Couldry & Hepp, 2016) in which they also developed their initial youthful media habits.

Periode	20 okt. 2022
Sted for afholdelse	European Communication Research and Education Association, Belgien
Grad af anerkendelse	International