Affective news: a case-study of the work of emotions in news coverage of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study of affective discourse in the news is critical for understanding how world events become meaningful to audiences, and important in light of the fact that the profession of journalism maintains problematic ideas of the role of emotions in news texts. Within the ideals of journalism are notions that emotional narratives and affective discourses are secondary, or even degrading, to serious news stories. Other journalistic ideals view emotions as a kind of necessary evil to the selling of news. Lastly, in scholarship around the democratic potential of human interest or soft news stories (typically narrated using emotive language), there is an idea that soft news stories are only meaningful in so far as they act as a gateway to serious news issues. These theories of serious news degrade the role that the affects play in news texts. This paper suggests that emotions and the deployment of affective discourse in news texts can be understood as meaningful beyond their work in selling news stories or acting as a gateway to serious issues. This paper is interested in the ascension of "serious" news, and the way in which emotion in the news became regarded as trivial and unimportant. More specifically, I examine the division between serious, factual, objective news and dramatic, emotional human-interest stories, and their associated classificatory terms "hard" and "soft" news. This paper attempts to problematize the characterization of serious news as non-emotional, and non-serious news as emotional, by demonstrating how the press's commitment to the public sphere is an affective commitment predicated on the idea of "care." As this paper argues, the press's commitment to the public sphere, though, is vague and ambiguous. The effect of ambiguity around concepts of the public sphere and regarding ideas of care is that the press envisions care in differing ways. The differential alignment of the press with humanitarian goals, thus, works to privilege certain sites and methods of care over others. In this way, news coverage reflects a politics of care that operates through the alignment of public sympathies with pre-existing authorities of aid, relief and assistance. In order to demonstrate the affective work of the press, this paper examines news coverage of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".