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.