The power of empathy is reshaping our world — outside traditional media, at least. The taglines of the big social movements of the past decade — Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Voice-Treaty-Truth — are all proudly, openly, bottom-up demands for recognition and respect.
Yet as empathy trends, journalists recoil. It’s been distorted by a nasty antipathy that the craft’s dominant tabloid populism has nurtured, hidden behind the cool pretence of objectivity with a formulaic both-sides balance.
A demand for empathy has become the go-to campaigning response to our understanding of intersectionality — all those ways that overlapping layers of discrimination and privilege shape our different identities.
It’s now central to the popular discourse of emotional intelligence — the ability to manage your own emotions and understand the emotions of others — which exploded off the back of Daniel Goleman‘s 1995 book of the same name. Its conscious practice is step one in human-centred design, which through Stanford University’s D.school has come to be the intellectual operating system for innovation in the global digital transition.
But for too many journalists, it feels somehow too squishy for a craft that puffs itself up with a prideful hard-boiled cynicism. Sure, we are happy to be caught up in the emotional contagion (and the audience boosts) of a natural disaster or a deeply human tragedy — when it’s close enough to home. But once blinded by our own transcendental identities, it suddenly becomes too soft-hearted, too much like, gasp, bias!
It’s a fight that keeps roiling journalism like the continuing fight that started at The Washington Post between its editor Marty Baron and journalists of colour Wesley Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.
Emerging from 19th-century German literary aesthetics (as einfühlung, or that sense of feeling your way inside a work of art), the concept travelled through the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung (of course) into our modern English-language adaptation of the originally Greek “pathos” to describe feeling our way outside ourselves into the experiences, the lived journeys, of others.
Sounds like what good — great — journalism should be.
Across the late 20th century, research has concluded that it is a learned skill; “cognitive empathy”. Journalists have long incorporated plenty of these skills into our news-gathering practices, with all those head-nodding verbal and non-verbal ticks that suggest we’re listening, understanding, on their side. The problem is that without follow through, as Janet Malcolm skewered the craft in “The Journalist and the Murderer”, these ticks are more readily identified as con artist’s tricks by a more media-literate society.
Instead, too much of journalism has embraced the newsworthy drama of the populist resentment — the antipathy — that is pushing back against “the requisite empathy of love to break through the prejudice, contempt and yes, violence, of the past” (as Noel Pearson wrote in his Boyer lecture just 12 months ago).
In part, it’s the domination of the kick-down News Corp tabloid style, part the perceptions of the clickbait newsworthiness of the nasty punch over the out-reached hand, and part a jemmying of the empathy-antipathy pairing into a noxious both-sides rendering.
It’s also changing journalistic practice: it’s the fear of appearing too empathetic — too soft — driving the deliberate semiotics of formulaic disrespect in the now near-universal aggressively interrupting interviewer style.
Saturday’s announcement that Tracey Holmes is departing the ABC is a reminder that some of the most powerful interviews get more out of the empathy of silence and space — of listening — such as her unforgettable 2007 interview with NRL coach Wayne Bennett (which unfortunately no longer appears to be online).
Or take the ABC’s Australian Story, which strips the interviewer out of the story to tell the story of people usually outside the news cycle, or, inside the cycle, the skilfully slow reveal (some more successful than others) of Annabel Crabb’s Kitchen Cabinet.
Twisted by a resentful antipathy, empathy can quickly turn parochial, even bigoted — a weapon seized from the weak and turned to the benefit of the strong. Since the Voice vote, much of the media commentariat has leaned on its ideals to demand “respect” for majority voices as the much reported but little republished open letter from First Nations peoples said of the establishment’s lauding of the majority non-Indigenous No vote for it’s “nobility”.
Meanwhile, Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke was pushing back against the selective empathy that has characterised much of the reporting and commentary out of the Israel-Hamas war, saying “the concept of competitive grief, which … has driven some of the media, is something that I don’t want to see in Australia”.
Given yet again a choice between the warmth of empathy and the cool of political analysis, Australia’s media leapt to its safe place: “Labor split”.
Ah yes – Labor Split. To be trotted out every time there is a discussion or debate within Labor. Did we see Liberals Split headline when Julian Leeser, Bridget Archer and others defected from Dutton’s nasty stand?
The real problem is that journalists are not as clever and insightful as they think they are. Cynicism is easy. Anyone can sneer and suspect the worst motives from the people they report on. This lesson is absorbed in newsrooms as young hacks quickly learn to get with the ‘well-he-would-say-that-wouldn’t-he’ vibe emitted from their editors. Except they don’t really do that at all. They’re cynical about things they should take at face value and utterly gullible in the face of even more cynical spin from politicians and others who have discovered that the key to winning over the media is to to feed their sense of nihilism. They live in the bubble of the PR/media communications industry and end up mistaking their so-called BS detectors for discrimination and intelligence. What journos need is more humility and empathy. They need to stop with the illusion that they are the smartest people in the room and think before they write and speak. I wouldn’t put any money on it, however. The industry that employs them is deeply corrupt and part of the machine that creates the mountain of self-serving BS the rest of us have to live with.
This is a powerful article that deserves recognition and credit for addressing the fundamental issue that we face, fair and balanced media that acknowledges empathy as a base for logic and reason. I wait for articles like this for months, getting snippets in the meantime. Thank you Christopher.
Right wing think tanks around the world are savvy to the power of mainstream media yet their smaller cousins, the left version, give it short shrift allowing it to fester.
Our country will continue to have strip’s torn off its democracy until some kind of balance can be restored to the political bias behind mainstream media.
The way forward is buying the rights to half of mainstream media, government intervention to legislate fairness in media is a dream that is in direct conflict with just how powerful right wing think tanks know that control of media is critical to political dominance.
Your job isn’t to be nasty or nice. Your job is to tell me what’s going on and what the alternatives are. Both adversarial and cosy can be tedious (you have to sit through hours of Crabb to catch a nugget of insight) but getting information is the job.
Every one of the mighty lions of the Victorian parliamentary press gallery missed the biggest story of the year (that Dan Andrews was going), leaving them wittering about North Face jackets when more substantial analysis was called for.
Nobody is calling for those Javerts to throw themselves into the river, but perhaps barking at a politician will yield less information than slow and patient research by other means. Perhaps the set-piece interview is overrated as an information-gathering tool, and that it’s long past time for the old dogs of the newsroom to learn some new tricks.
A good interview is one where the interviewer has done their research and is now questioning the interviewee to get reactions/explanations of their behaviour/actions. Expecting to gather information from a politician in these times of pollies presenting the party line narrative parrot like without variation is a waste of time leading to a boring interview.
Agree, a former Koch think tank employee in UK said it made so easy to promote their policies on climate etc. using ‘reports’ etc. by pseudo intellectuals, that astroturf media presenters, reporters and journalists easily, due to the lack of science, data and research literacies amongst the latter.
See Mehdi Hasan, on the need for ‘receipts’ and empirical questions with accepted answers, that preclude blather, bluster and avoidance when interviewees (mostly of the right) are gifted ‘open’ questions e.g. Trump, then becomes unmanageable…..
‘The now common aggressively interrupting interviewing style is a fightback against accusations of being ‘too soft’.’
What was traditionally the style of 7,9 & 10 has now also been mastered by the ABC – none better than Sarah Ferguson. It might be suitable for 4 Corners, but doesn’t suit 7.30. We need interviewers to elicit information and educate us – not show us how tough and clever they are. Barry Cassidy, Leigh Sales, & Kerry O’Brien are reminders of standards that we expect from our National broadcaster!
Speerus Interruptus deserves a mention too.
Bold statement.
I don’t know how you get Leigh Sales into the same company as Kerry O’Brien & Barry Cassidy.