Journalism as an affective institution: Emotional labor and the discourse on fraud at Der Spiegel

Abstract

This paper explores the underlying aspects surrounding emotional labor in everyday life inside news-rooms and how these aspects contribute to discursively (de)stabilize journalism as an institution. In order to do this, we apply the literature on affect and emotion in journalism as well as on discursive institutionalism to the analysis of a particular moment of crisis: the fraud scandal around Claas Relo-tius, an award-winning German reporter for the news magazine Der Spiegel. The discovery of his massive fake feature stories caused a fierce and controversial discussion on the media about struc-tural problems in journalism as well as the use of emotion in feature stories and exclusion mecha-nisms inside the newsroom. In our textual analysis of 138 articles on this case published in German and selected international media between December 2018 and December 2019, we uncovered four main areas in which the role of emotions is discursively negotiated (1) Form: feature stories and their use of emotions, (2) Actor: emotional attributions to Relotius, (3) Practice: emotions as part of edito-rial practices, understood here as emotional labor in the newsroom, and (4) Institution: the descrip-tion of the event and its affective implications for journalism as a whole.