Is British domestic news undergoing a crisis of identity? Ever since a BBC executive described Kate Adie's TV news report of the shooting tragedy at Dunblane Primary School in 1996 as too "forensic," news reporting has focused increasingly on emotions. Now this trend has gone much further. Instead of a news reporter's starting point being facts and analysis about the outside world, people's inner lives and emotional reaction to events — including the reporter's own — dominate how events are perceived. Emotional indulgence and sentimentalism are replacing informative, facts-based news reporting. Today reporters are providing Therapy News.

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, i.e. what people feel happened, what the reporter feels happened and what people feel about other's 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 October 6, 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 eyewitness 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 those directly involved must have felt — regardless of how many coped without the aid of trauma experts — were widely reported after Paddington. According to Peter Hodkinson, director of the Center 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 reopen 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 was the news media getting on with its 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 identified. 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 symbolized 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
The problem with Therapy News isn't that people's emotions are included in reports; it's the priority they're given. Unlike in the past, contemporary news reports are swamped in emotion as if reporting and analyzing feelings were the reporter's chief purpose. As a result, victims are granted expert status. Within the news imagination it's as if victims' suffering had endowed them with superior knowledge about the causes and solutions to events. This is not an argument for censoring their views altogether, or a claim that others are more expert in what it feels to be a victim. What is happening is that experts in a particular field are being sidelined in favor of victims' testimony.

A good example is the media reaction this past summer to the statements by the parents of Sarah Payne, the murdered eight year old. Mrs. Payne's quotes in the News of the World, that "pedophiles cannot stop themselves" and that "parents must have the right to protect their children," were featured alongside the presentation of "Name 'n' Shame" pedophile lists and "Sarah's Law" campaigns as the only solutions to pedophile attacks. The Mirror elevated the victim's 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 pedophiles 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 experiences 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, this year on August 1, Detective Inspector Hamish Brown launched the (London) 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 editorializing through emotions? According to Sarah Lockett, the national press coverage of her personal experience of a stalker means it would have been "silly" not to refer to her 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 favor of hanging? The reporter's analysis of an issue may well be impartial and clearly distinguished from an aside about their own experience, but the report is 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 a tale of personal experience, in which case the reporter is part of the news story. This was recognized by Justin Rowlatt, the ITN journalist who was on the 12:10 London-to-Leeds train that crashed at Hatfield on October 17. 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 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," 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 British public's increasing 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 counseling provision. This appears true considering how train accidents, for example, were reported in the past. On October 9, 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 in 1952 referred 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 scrutinized by psychologists or wrongly attributed to them.

Pressures
Another explanation for Therapy News is the economic pressures on television news editors, who fear declining audiences in a competitive market. Viewers, it is said, switch off because they are bored; news no longer relates to them. There's no doubt that reporters could do more to provide critical content rather than regurgitate press releases. The trouble is that in the name of changing news, emotional style and content has become the fashionable solution. It seems to offer a way of connecting to and pulling in an audience; we all share the capacity to cry or feel compassion with victims. As Natasha Walter, an Independent columnist, argued after Paddington, although news coverage should avoid "slipping into a sludge of sentimentality _ the reportage we see today represents a positive change ... This is a more humanized way of looking at the world, where we are more tolerant of each other's failings and where an individual — even a man or a policeman — is allowed the space to be weak, where looking at death involves grief and horror." These days, arguing for more "hard" news seems cold, inhuman or even boring. However, at least its provision recognizes that the public have a common need for basic, key news facts not swamped in emotion. Without this, how can human beings share a common knowledge to make sense of the world?

Therapy News reflects the priority given by the authorities to emotions and those who have suffered by others. For example, it is the Home Office that gives 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 organize the Paynes' daily appeals for information, which intensified passions about the highest-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 pedophile, the police response to their questions was 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-pedophile 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 criticized and more counseled 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 counseling couch. In this "Let It All Hang Out" culture, Therapy News offers an overindulgent feast of feeling, replaying individuals' emotions as if we all feel the same way. Above all, the news reporter's 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?

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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