Newswise — Though professional journalists are taught to remain removed from and objective about the subject of their story, sometimes the events are so tragic it is impossible to maintain that distance. When legendary CBS television news anchor Walter Cronkite reported the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to a shocked nation, he lost his journalistic reserve and quietly choked-up, fighting his emotional response to the confirmation he had received from correspondent Dan Rather.
For just a moment, Cronkite was speechless before he resumed his report. “His reaction conveyed the gravity of what had happened, but it also placed him into the story of Kennedy’s assassination,” says Mike Lyons, assistant professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pa.
But a recent trend in news reporting, known as "emo-journalism," has taken Cronkite’s understandably human response to the next level.
“Emo-journalism is a trend that is probably being talked about in classes around the country,” says Lyons. “Recent examples like the CNN video of Anderson Cooper rescuing a child in the chaos of post-quake Haiti, and Sanjay Gupta performing brain surgery on television, indicate that journalistic ethics are changing.”
Lyons says this shift, where reporters are becoming part of, and sometimes the whole story, may be a result of the ubiquity of emergent technology.
“Cameras can go anywhere now and they can constantly be running,” Lyons says. Couple that with an appetite from the audience for ‘reality’ and it follows that those telling the stories would become part of the stories.”
But was it wrong for Anderson Cooper to swoop in and extricate the child from danger? Lyons says the issue is complicated. “In the end, I tell my students it is up to the individual person," he adds. "Most of my students say it is wrong for the reporter to insinuate themselves into the story, and I tend to agree. In that moment when they become the story, how can they bear faithful witness to the truth?”
Lyons is a former reporter for the Associated Press, and in that capacity, has covered hurricanes in the Caribbean. He teaches intro to journalism and feature writing at SJU.
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