Emotionality in the Television Coverage of Airplane Disasters

ABSTRACT

This article examines how emotion is built into the television coverage of airplane disasters in the form of narratives, language and sound. It shows that the reporting embeds emotional content within a set of stylistic features. These features include the outsourcing of emotions, detailed descriptions, juxtapositions, contrasts, conditional perfect as well as technical features such as emotional language and sounds. Based on the findings, we argue that there are layers of complexity in emotional storytelling, which build on a variety of narrative, linguistic and technical features that journalists can draw on. Although we link these to the coverage of airplane disasters, our findings have broader implications for the study of emotionality in journalism studies and disaster communication. As such, these features show the distinctive ways in which emotions may be used in other forms of media coverage, establishing a broad repertoire of emotional practices in journalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• disaster
• emotion
• discourse analysis
• subjectivity
• objectivity
• television news

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We are aware that the MH17 Malaysia Airlines Flight, which crashed in Ukraine in 2014 after being hit by a Russian-made missile (BBC 2016), received similar levels of media interest. However, given the influences of the political conflict and crisis on the reporting at the time, we decided against investigating the coverage of this incident. We also decided against examining the more recent Boeing 737 Max plane incidents (Ethiopian Airlines 302 and Lion Air 610) because a Box of Broadcast search revealed these incidents received significantly less media coverage than Malaysia Airlines 370 and Germanwings 4U9525. For illustration, there were 145 broadcasts on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, 140 on Germanwings 4U9525, 49 broadcasts on Ethiopian Airlines 302 and 32 on Lion Air 610.

2 The fact that the cause of the Germanwings 9525 incident was resolved quickly is not relevant because it is reasonable to assume that the media ceased reporting once there had been no more news.

Additional information

Funding

The research did not receive grants from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.