Argentina in 1982. Even though correspondents in the field embedded with the British forces saw their stories heavily censored, they identified themselves closely with the troops and the war (Tumber, 2004: 191). The British journalist and historian Max Hastings, who covered the war, at the time quoted his father (who had also been a war correspondent) as saying (cited in Belsey & Chadwick, 1992: 115):
When one’s nation is at war, reporting becomes an extension of the war effort. Objectivity only comes back into fashion when the black-out comes down.
Other direct challenges to objectivity, and particularly the concepts of driving out emotion and adopting a value neutral stance, came after the 1987 deregulation of the US radio market and the advent of openly partisan talk radio. In television, the right-leaning Fox News Channel, launched in 1996 and owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, challenged what it saw as the liberal bias of the establishment television news networks and presented news ‘with a voice’ (Maras, 2013: 72). It in turn spawned a liberal-leaning version in MSNBC. It can be argued that these channels and partisan journalism have become established as part of the US media landscape and they are important vehicles for attracting advertising revenue. Maras (2013: 179) argues that Fox turns back the clock to the time of partisan US media in the 1800s before the codification of objectivity. The ‘Foxification’ of news has been rejected by several established media organisations such as the BBC (Maras, 2013: 179); its challenge is symptomatic of the often tense professional and academic debate around objectivity, the contestation of boundaries and what Gieryn (1999) called ‘credibility contests’.
A further challenge was represented by the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1960s and 1970s, which was ‘powered by feeling as well as intellect’ (Hentoff, cited in Schudson, 1978: 187) and featured writers such as Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. It was a reaction to what some of these writers saw as the failure of conventional news reporting. Mailer said (cited in Weingarten, 2006: 54):
I had felt that I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time.
But this new form of journalism, or combination of literature and journalism, was also not taken up by mainstream journalism. Its openly avowed that subjectivity was a clear challenge to the normative values laid down earlier, which ultimately prevailed. Stylistically, stories by the New Journalism authors often eschewed the classic inverted pyramid structure that was so typical of the objectivity paradigm (although the opposite construction, the ‘delayed drop’, in which facts are introduced after a ‘soft’, feature-like start to a story, is often used as a device in conventional journalism). Weingarten argues that it was not just the enduring power of the objectivity norm but also economics that led to the decline of New Journalism (2006: 292). US television channels siphoned away advertising dollars from the big magazines that had been the main outlet for writers such as Mailer, Didion and Wolfe.
In this age of analogue media, at the turn of the 20th century, it was above all at times of crisis and traumatic news that the objectivity norm was challenged, as was the case during the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s, the attacks of September 11 and the 2003 Gulf War. It was during the period of the wars in former Yugoslavia that the BBC correspondent Martin Bell, a veteran reporter of conflict from Vietnam to Nicaragua, openly took issue with the objectivity norm and particularly the component of detachment (1997: 16):
When I started out as a war reporter in the mid-sixties I worked in the shadow of my distinguished predecessors and of a long and honourable BBC tradition of distance and detachment. I thought of it then as objective and necessary. I would now call it bystanders’ journalism … I am no longer sure about the notion of objectivity, which seems to me now to be something of an illusion and a shibboleth.
Bell coined the phrase ‘journalism of attachment’ and began a debate that is still running today, not least within the BBC. His plea was not against fact-based or impartial reporting, but for, as he put it, a ‘journalism that cares as well as knows’ and crucially not standing neutral between right and wrong or good and evil (1997). In fact, such arguments have a long tradition, and Bell himself cites the legendary BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby’s passionate coverage of the liberation of the Belsen death camp in 1945. Indeed, he could also have cited the reporting of Martha Gellhorn in Dachau. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who also covered the siege of Sarajevo, does not go as far as dismissing objectivity per se but argues that not every side in a conflict should be treated equally. In the case of Bosnia, she argued against setting up a moral equivalence between the aggressor and victim, saying the West had the duty to stop the Serbs (1996: 16–17). At the heart of such arguments by Amanpour is the assertion that there is no contradiction between a journalist being objective and attached or ‘caring’. The BBC correspondent Fergal Keane has also criticised the media’s framing of traumatic conflict in tones that reflect consensual Western political thinking. Most notably, Keane argued that early reporting ‘bought the line’ that the 1994 Rwandan massacre was part of a tribal war (1995: 6):
The mass of early reporting of the Rwandan killings conveyed the sense that the genocide was the result of some innate inter-ethnic loathing that had erupted into irrational violence … several of the world’s leading newspapers bought the line, in the initial stages, that the killings were a straightforward ‘tribal war’.
But for many others, such as the BBC’s David Loyn, abandoning the ideals of impartiality or being ‘liberated from the yoke of objectivity’ risks becoming lost in moral relativism that threatens the whole business of reporting (2003). In terms of boundary work, Bell’s practice of journalism was seen as being outside what is viewed as acceptable and thus led to what Gieryn (1999) labelled as the genre of ‘expulsion’.
One of the most emotional phases in US journalism was the period of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Many forms of American media engaged in highly jingoistic coverage and adopted the Bush administration’s language of the ‘War on Terror’. News anchors wore pins showing the Stars and Stripes and statistical analyses of broadcast and text content had an overwhelming preponderance of pro-administration sources. British media, primarily the BBC, The Guardian and The Economist, were able to capitalise on growing disillusion with the highly partisan US coverage following September 11, increasing their market share and circulation in the United States through their more objective approach. Analysing September 11, Sreberny (2002: 221) has argued that the combination of what was a global media event watched live by millions on television and the outpouring of emotion created an ‘affective public sphere’. The everyday taken-for-granted norms of journalism were shaken in rushed opinion and emotion, driven by trauma:
The balance seemed to shift between the ordinary work of journalism and a kind of extraordinary writing that people seemed to need to write and others to read – writing as catharsis, writing trauma out of ourselves, trauma talk.
Other academics have identified a series of triggers, which can lead to the normative rules of journalism being challenged or disrupted in favour of emotional coverage. In the wake of September 11, Schudson (2002: 40) attempted to define the criteria that led journalists to move into Hallin’s sphere of consensus in which they cast aside the more normal reporting behaviour or the ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’ (Hallin, 1986). Schudson (2002) identifies three typical circumstances when normative journalistic behaviour breaks down:
1 In moments of tragedy, journalists tend to assume a pastoral role. This is characterised by hushed, reverent tones of television and radio presenters and is evident at times of political assassination (e.g., President Kennedy in 1963), state funerals or the mourning of victims.
2 In moments of public danger, whether from terror attacks or natural disaster (such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005), journalists tend to offer practical advice (e.g., disseminating a public health campaign) and communicate solidarity.
3 In moments of threats to national security (e.g., the botched American invasion of the Bay of Pigs on Cuba in 1961) journalists tend to willingly withhold or temper their reports.
For Schudson, September 11 fulfilled all three criteria – a tragedy a public danger and a threat to national security, which led to President