When News Use Feels Wrong: Four Reactions to Misalignments Between Feeling Rules and Feeling Responses

Audiences’ involvements with news have been shown to be far more varied than normative theories of liberal democracy typically suggest, often evading standards of unemotional objectivity prescribed by civic duty ideals. However, news users’ methods of navigating normative expectations about their emotive experiences with news remain unclear. This article operationalizes the concept of “feeling rules” to uncover responses to discrepancies between emotive expectations and experiences with news, developing a novel analytical approach using linguistic and paralinguistic indices of perceived norm breaking. It applies this to a quota sample of Danes between 18 and 24 years of age, asked about their information-seeking practices using semi-structured interviews and a card-sorting exercise to prompt reflections about a broad spectrum of media. The article makes manifest four strategies for negotiating misalignments between feelings rules and emotive experiences: (1) discontinuation and (2) continuation of media use flouting feeling rules, (3) compartmentalization, and (4) justification. The findings advance our scholarly understanding of news use as a site of complex social identity negotiation for young people, where not only externally visible behaviors but also emotive experiences such as seriousness and (dis)trust are prescribed, in order to explain underlying mechanisms behind the behavioral change—and resistance to change.