Anger and the investigative journalist

Abstract

What is the place of anger in the work of journalism? Based on a discourse analysis of investigative journalists’ reflections on the role of anger in their work, this paper explores common understandings of the utility and ‘proper place’ of anger in journalism. I argue that anger can be usefully theorised by drawing on P.F. Strawson’s account of anger as a reactive attitude and Amia Srinivsasan’s account of anger having dimensions of aptness and prudence. In contrast to existing work arguing for a norm proscribing emotion in journalistic texts, anger forms a valued component in the work of investigative journalists, albeit one with important norms around its control and management.

“Personally, I think it’s an important part of being a good journalist. I think one needs to be motivated by feelings of a sense of injustice, or your anger at a sense of injustice. And I think we all do.”

Interview Respondent

What is the place of anger in the work of journalism? Forms of the profession which deal in the reporting of conflict, suffering and various forms of criminality often find themselves in a vicarious position, standing halfway between their audiences and the wrongdoing of others. For journalism of this kind, the invitation of a front row seat to compose the rough draft of history is often also an opportunity to see injustice and its effects unfold. It would not be strange if journalists in that position might develop feelings towards the subjects of their work.

The idea that journalists might be angry while working is often considered a threat to maintaining appropriate ‘neutrality’ in reporting – a concern that anger evinces an inappropriate attachment to values or outcomes that is not the rightful professional place of the ‘good’ reporter. Emotion in journalists – and emotion that marks an attachment to people and causes in particular – is often treated in studies of journalism as though it were a professional taboo (Calvert, 1999). Underlying such concerns is a view that intense feeling (especially of a moral kind) might draw journalists into misrepresenting facts or applying an inappropriately coloured set of values to them. In either case, the basic concern is that emotion carries a danger of ‘misrepresenting’ reality. It is worth adding that such a concern needn’t imply the possibility of an ‘objective’, view-from-nowhere journalist, but rather that within a world of human subjectivity and attachment, ‘less’ emotion is – all things considered – a preferred quality in the agents that we send to go and report the world to us.

There is some evidence for the existence of a norm in journalism that values the concealing of journalists’ own feelings. Wahl-Jorgensen (2013), for example, has examined the use of emotionality in Pulitzer-prize-winning publications and argued that while representing the emotions of subjects is a valued element of storytelling, journalists generally concealed their own feelings in the work they created. (Stupart, 2021), in turn, has argued that this absence of journalists’ own feelings (anger or otherwise) in their work can be understood as the outcome of a need to produce accounts of suffering and injustice for audiences that appear to be both factually authentic and free from obvious value judgements – qualities that might then make it possible for those accounts to provoke moralizing encounters for audiences.

While it may be reasonable to infer the existence of a taboo on the feelings of journalists in the texts they produce, it is not as obvious that having feelings – of anger in particular – is everywhere and always unacceptable during the doing of the work prior to publication. That is, while one might not be able to be angry in the increasingly metaphorical pages of a newspaper without undermining oneself, is being angry in the process of news production before publication understood by journalists to be inappropriate in the same way?

This paper outlines an account of anger and its role in the work of investigative journalists in South Africa as a route into arguing for a view of anger as both apt and useful in the work of journalism. After a brief overview of the context, interviews and approach to analysis that underlie this research, I discuss Srinivasan's (2018) account of anger as having dimensions of aptness and prudence and the connection between this view and other influential conceptions of anger as a reactive attitude (Manne, 2017; Strawson, 2013) and a productive energy for the work of opposing injustice (Lorde, 1981). Finally, I argue that that understandings of aptness and productivity pervade investigative journalists’ reflections on the role that anger plays in their own work, while nevertheless falling short of being a universally held view.

Background

This paper comes from an interest in the reflections of South African investigative journalists on their working lives, the forms of intimidation they experience and the feelings that characterise their work. Investigative reporting in the country has a long and (mostly) distinguished history, particularly in marginal media organisations which have occasionally published spectacular accounts of wrongdoing and conspiracy on a shoestring budget (Harber 2020: 302).

In 2017, Daily Maverick (at the time, a relatively marginal, online-only news organisation) and AmaBhungane (a small team of independently funded investigative journalists) broke their first stories in what would become known as the ‘GuptaLeaks’ scandal, after the surnames of three brothers who coordinated a circle of corruption including much of the country’s government and law enforcement. It was the largest scandal in post-apartheid South African history and highlighted the value of investigative reporting, kicking off a race to build or enhance investigative reporting capacity in national newsrooms. Despite the enormous political and legal effects of the scandal, investigative reporting has remained the task of a relatively small number of journalists - there are perhaps fewer than two dozen individuals engaged in full-time investigative work.

Resisting journalists’ efforts has been an often sophisticated mix of government officials, corporations and criminal enterprises operating within the confines of an ostensibly democratic state structure in ways similar to those described by Keeble (2019). Intimidation ranges from social media attacks on journalists’ professional reputations to the expensive disinformation campaigns of disgraced PR firm Bell Pottinger and occasional targeted burglaries and physical threats – tactics that make the situation similar to other democratic-but-increasingly-securitised, contexts where collisions between independent reporting and the corrupt are taking place.

Methodology

Sixteen semi-structured interviews (Holstein and Gubrium, 2003; DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree, 2006) were conducted with journalists who were currently or had previously been involved in investigative reporting, with discussion topics including motivations for the work, the emotions that characterised it, experiences with various forms of intimidation and the development of relationships with sources. The interview topic guide included prompts asking about recent work and the feelings involved at different stages of projects that respondents had worked on. Other interview topics included asking whether emotions affected what stories respondents chose to pursue and how they pursued them, as well as any norms that they felt existed around particular feelings. Anger emerged early on as a common theme in respondents’ accounts of their work, leading to the specific attention paid to it here.

One important caveat in a paper reflecting on anger is that while every respondent recognised anger as one element of reporting to some degree, this should not be taken to suggest that anger is the only – or even primary - emotion that respondents reported. To the extent that it makes sense to talk of emotions as discrete, respondents recounted the satisfaction (joy?) of work well done, the boredom of sifting through documents and the excitement of new stories, fresh leads. Nothing in what follows should lead the reader to think that the South African investigative journalist is especially angry, or that anger is the dominant experience of the work. The more modest claim is simply that anger is a common thread in the emotional life of respondents in ways that suggest a normative logic behind it. Like many emotions, it is a thing with rules and assumed effects. It is these that the interviews explored.

Interviews took place in early 2021, after obtaining IRB and newsroom permission, but at a time when meeting in person was still impractical. As a result, all interviews were conducted over Zoom with video enabled, so as to resist the complete loss of sociality that audio-only formats can produce. Each generally lasted around 45 min to an hour, with a maximum length of approximately an hour and a half. Interviewees covered a range of career levels, from senior, salaried journalists who had been doing major investigations for decades to relatively junior investigative journalists working outside of major newsrooms. Respondents tended to be male (14 participants) and white (all but four participants). This may reflect the demographics of full-time investigative journalism in South Africa, but also makes it difficult to argue that consistencies in talk about anger across respondents would not be complicated across these dimensions. Indeed, existing reflections on how anger intersects with gender (Manne, 2017) and race (Lorde, 1981; Srinivasan, 2018) suggests that anger might in practice be available differently to different journalists even where normative ideals about it might be shared.

Respondents were initially selected to achieve near-saturation coverage of leading investigative newsrooms in the country and expanded through snowballed referrals to include journalists at a number of other newsrooms, as well as those working in smaller publications and independently. Respondent’s identities and the newsrooms they came from were anonymised after transcription to allow them to speak freely about life in a relatively small and well-connected professional community. Anonymisation also made it easier to share common reflections on various themes with respondents themselves once interviewing concluded. This practice was intended to give respondents an insight into what their colleagues understood the challenges and motivations of the work to entail, making the project more useful to them than an academic paper such as this might be. In line with this commitment, as well as an acknowledgement that respondents are not simply ‘data’, but themselves theorists of their own contexts, this paper has also tried to reproduce their own formulations of their ideas as fully as possible, within the constraints of the journal article format and editorial demands.

Once transcribed, interviews were thematically coded (Aronson, 1994) using Nvivo in order to organise discussions of common themes, including – for the purposes of this paper – respondents’ reflections on anger in their work. These reflections were then explored using a discourse analytic approach interested in common articulations in how anger was discussed. In particular, this analysis focused on the use of metaphor and normative language as a way of exploring constructions of the ‘proper’ relationship of anger to journalistic work.

Journalism studies and the emotional turn

Journalism studies has recently returned to questions of emotionality and its implications for understanding what journalism is and does as a part of a broader ‘emotional turn’ (Kotišová, 2019; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019a, 2019b). As a part of this shift, the emotionality of audiences and texts has been of particular interest (Beckett and Deuze, 2016; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018), a focus which perhaps dovetails with contemporary concerns around the political effects of polarised, emotional news styles. Less attention is perhaps being paid to the emotional dimensions of news production – that is, what emotions characterize the professional lives of journalists and how those feelings are understood and made a part of their professional identities. (Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021: 1568), for example, have pointed to the “substantial and largely unacknowledged emotional work” that goes into the daily work of news production as one promising direction of current research.

To this question, Kotišová (2017) and Jukes (2017) have both provided accounts of the emotional work performed by journalists covering traumatic events. They draw on Hochschild's (1983) work on emotional labour to draw attention to the emotional work required to cultivate forms of detachment as a way of dealing with traumatic reporting experiences and argue that far from being an intruder in journalists’ professional lives, emotion is a core part of how the work gets done ‘well’. Elsewhere, Stupart (2021b) has argued for the importance of seeing emotion as fundamental to managing day-to-day interactions with potential sources and threats as well as being a part of journalists’ practical moral reasoning (Stupart, 2021b).

Links between anger, moral reasoning and the work of journalism are not without precedent. In work on moral injury, for example, the association between violations of moral norms and intense feeling is well established (McDonald, 2020). In the domain of moral injury studies, as in work on PTSD (Feinstein, 2002; Osmann et al., 2020), research tends to focus on diagnosing and understanding the effects of moral injury/PTSD, rather than exploring its discursive context. One notable exception to this focus is McDonald's (2020) work exploring differences between violations of moral norms in which the journalist themselves are at fault, versus violations in which they are betrayed by others.

The entanglement of feelings and moral judgements has long haunted professionals’ reflections on their work. Three decades ago, interviewees would talk to Glasser and Ettema (1989) about “gut reactions” (p.8) to “wrongs”. A decade later, Bell would write of Yugoslavia that if it “would not move us… what would that then say of us?” (Bell, 1998: 103). Which is to say that the evidence that certain forms of journalism might be infused with feelings lies, in a sense, in plain sight (Beckett and Deuze, 2016). Despite this, Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) has observed the existence of norms against in-text, public-facing displays of emotion and (journalists’ own) moral judgement (Calvert, 1999; Glasser and Ettema, 1989). Taken together, these perspectives suggest that feelings and normative judgements are important dimensions of a range of journalism practices, but that they may be constrained in their expression in ways that bear further investigation.

Theorising anger

In laying out the received wisdom of how emotion has been understood in (Western, post-enlightenment) analytical philosophy, Arpaly (2000) recounts the view of emotion as akrasia, or unreasoned action potentially occurring against one’s best judgement. In this view, feelings (interpreted broadly) may produce akratic effects through either defeating our ability to make considered judgements at all (such as in the case of exhaustion or confusion) or making us unreasonably focused on particular facts or desires to the exclusion of all else (anger and sadness). The latter view, in particular, has a long history in accusations of anger being used to delegitimise the struggles of women and black people (Lorde 1981; Srinivasan 2018). In discussions of how ‘amateur’ photographers are discredited by journalists, Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti (2013: 968) similarly observe that for critics, “The emotional state of the amateur photographers is seen to have implications for the nature of their recordings. Amateurs are not selective, and the footage they produce is seen to be based on irrationality and emotional excess…”

Against this view, Arpaly argues that emotion can be understood as rational - as a reasonable response in situations where feeling in fact directs our attention to important elements of our contexts (Arpaly, 2000). She illustrates the case using the hypothetical example of Sam, a student who decides that he ought to be optimizing his grades and cutting back on his social life to accomplish this goal. When Sam finds himself failing to desire to do what it is he believes he ought to be doing and instead going out with friends, Arpaly argues that what is in fact happening is that Sam’s desire (to go out) is in fact a rational, information-bearing feeling that is directing him to do something that he in fact values (sociality), despite it not being a part of his all-things-considered priorities during earlier reflection.

Anger as a moral emotion

In line with Arpaly’s view of emotion as potentially rational and information-bearing, Strawson (2013) has highlighted anger as being an emotion of this kind. He describes what he calls ‘reactive attitudes’ in social life - feelings such as anger, shame, gratitude and forgiveness which appear to have a particularly moral character in that they arise alongside moral assessments of ourselves and others in ways that other feelings (such as, say, hunger) do not. The view that anger might go hand in hand with moral judgement is echoed by Srinivasan (2018: 7) when she says:

“Consider the difference between anger and another similarly negative emotion: disappointment. What makes anger intelligible as anger, and distinct from mere disappointment, is that anger presents its object as involving a moral violation: not just a violation of how one wishes things were, but a violation of how things ought to be.”

Srinivasan provides an idea of anger as being not an irrational distraction, but the feeling that accompanies the realization of an (egregious) moral violation. It is a feeling that draws our attention to important (moral) facts about a situation towards which we are angry. Anger, on this account, is not an akratic, irrational feeling, but one clearly tied to moral evaluations.

Srinivasan makes two useful distinctions in thinking about anger: that we can ask whether it was apt (is it justified to be angry?) and whether it is prudent (is it helpful/useful to be angry?). Anger, she argues, can be understood as subjectively apt insofar as it is tracking moral judgements of the person feeling it (without comment on whether those judgements are normatively true) independently of whether it might be prudent. Moreover, while anger might generally be subjectively apt, it is not always clear that it is prudent and what the (moral) relationship between prudence and aptness might be. The idea of anger as prudential to its subject has a long history in thinking about resistance and oppression – perhaps most famously in Lorde’s description of the feeling being “loaded with information and energy” (1997: 280). Anger is the feeling that can provide the strength necessary to prevail in difficult circumstances, provided one has developed the tools to use it constructively (Lorde 1981: 283).

Having made the point that anger ought not to be understood as an irrational distraction, it is these elements of aptness and prudence that structure the remaining discussion in this paper. Turning from moral philosophers to investigative journalists, ideas of aptness and prudence were repeatedly articulated in their reflections on anger in professional life.

Anger and the investigative journalist

In talking about when they experienced feelings of anger in their work, respondents would often describe the feeling in response to injustice of various kinds. By way of illustration, responses such as these were typical:

It’s not by accident that I do stories about corruption at [government entity], or corruption involving [government project] in [province]. I think there’s a strong activistic foundation to it. And when you see the money being diverted away from intended beneficiaries, I think any, hopefully, decent human being would become extremely angry if you consider the fact that this is a developmental state with finite resources that really should bring about very prudent and careful financial management. And when you encounter the opposite, it does make one pretty angry.

Respondent 1

And so you [are] just consistently reinforced in your knowledge that there is impunity and violence that just permeates this [organisation being investigated]. And it’s done at the behest of a classist, racist, status quo, and there’s absolutely no value to the lives of the people that are in the wrong side of this. […] I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t personal. It is personal. And anyone who sees me speak about this on the radio or whatever, they’d know that this is not academic for me, I’m personally, fucking personally invested. and I make no apologies for that. Some journalists would think that you need to temper, but again, my opinions aren’t just personal opinions. Everything that I say is rooted in the evidence of my investigation.

Respondent 10

[…] personally, I think it’s an important part of being a good journalist. I think one needs to be motivated by feelings of a sense of injustice, or your anger at a sense of injustice. And I think we all do. […] so I think certainly when you go to [a community] for instance, and you see how the poorest and the most vulnerable have been fleeced by some robber barons, or have been completely neglected by government, or are basically suffering because of corruption and greed, certainly it should motivate one. It should make one feel angry. And I think we should embrace that. And it does make us feel angry.

Respondent 2

Well, I have to say that anger is tempered by wonder on the other hand. So, I don’t see the rage and the anger necessarily as a bad propellant. I think it’s got to do with just feeling unfairness as a child and understanding. Okay, because I’m a girl, I’m a different kind of girl. I’ve got everybody fucking telling me what to do all the time. So, the resistance and the anger, is it even anger? It is. You know, watching people talk to adults in a demeaning fashion, watching men treat women like shit, watching someone beat someone else up. For some reason, I can’t not get involved. […] Is that the basic underlying, like never again? Will anybody fucking not do something when it’s happening in front of you, you owe it to another human being.

Respondent 8

There are a number of observations to be made in these accounts of anger. The first being that it is repeatedly and directly articulated as a moral feeling. Anger is repeatedly described as a feeling arising in response to injustice, whether it be the specific injustice of government or industry criminality and corruption (R1, R2), a “classist, racist, status quo” (R10) or a more general commitment to the abstract moral norms of Respondent 8’s “never again” reference to post-holocaust commitments not to stand by in the face of others’ suffering. In each case, feelings of anger are clearly directed at moral facts – of specific communities, the country at large, or the world more generally – and an evaluation that egregious violations of moral norms have occurred or are ongoing. Anger, in other words, is understood as apt, in the sense that Srinivasan describes.

In addition to giving accounts of anger as a justified moral feeling, respondents consistently constructed feeling anger as being normatively good: feeling angry is something that “any, hopefully, decent human being” would feel (R1) and a feeling for which “no apologies” are owed (R10). In the case of Respondent 2, the normative ‘goodness’ of anger is articulated not in terms of what a “good person” does, but as being “an important part of being a good journalist” and something that “we should embrace” as journalists. Though based on different evaluations of goodness (the ideal of the good person and the ideal of the good journalist), the function is the same in both instances – a view that anger is apt in Srinivasan’s sense of being appropriate (indeed, even obligatory) in the face of injustice.

The prudence of anger

While anger was frequently understood as apt, its usefulness to the work of investigative journalism was often described in more complicated terms. Respondents who described feeling angry during the course of their work were invited to reflect in more detail on their philosophy towards the feeling and its place in their practice. Common to almost all responses was an understanding that anger could be a powerful motivating force for the work of investigative journalism. As respondents variously made the point:

[…] I think you should allow yourself to become infuriated enough by [corruption]. Because it really allows you to tell a very powerful story then, I think. […] I think once again, if you can channel that anger correctly and channel it into your writing, it becomes a very powerful aid. It becomes almost like a driving force to make people realize that it’s not a victimless crime. […] I do get angered by this, and it fuels my journalism.

Respondent 1

I am lucky that I can actually take that energy, that fury, and turn it into a journalistic investigation. Where a lot of other people must go to Facebook, or the pub on the corner, just become depressed. […] I think as a journalist you have to get infuriated, or very happy, so emotion plays a role. We are very emotional beings in the newsroom. I think we channel that into our creativity.

Respondent 11

There’s a lot of stories that you can get really angry about, and that’s quite a good driving, motivating thing to push you forward and to go and investigate the story. Getting pissed off about a topic is good for fuel for that fire

Respondent 4

I’d say that half of the motivation for [story] was anger. I was just so fucked off with what the government had done. And I think that’s a good thing for a journalist. If you want to be an investigative journalist, you need to be pissed off about the state of affairs. Honestly, we’re not here to be … You’ve got to be really … Because it’s thankless work, and sometimes you get a big pat on the back, but most of the time, you’re up against it. People don’t care as much as you do, so you’ve got to have something that drives you […]

Respondent 7

Anger appears in these reflections as a “aid” (R1), “energy” (R11), “fuel” (R1, R4), “force” (R1), “motivation” (R4, R7) and something that “drives” the journalist (R7, R4, R1). Common to all of these metaphors is the idea of anger as an aid to action. Contrary to the fantasy of investigative journalists meeting shady figures in parking garages and conducting improvised spycraft, much of the daily work of investigative journalism can be fairly frustrating, specialist trawling of financial and other records. In such contexts, anger (along with other feelings, such as excitement) can serve to keep journalists interested in and committed to a story. Insofar as anger is also a moral feeling, it further serves to keep the moral judgement underpinning the reporting alive. If, per Srinivasan, a feeling of anger arises together with its object of focus (a moral judgement), it is reasonable to assume that the continuation of the feeling can serve to keep that judgement alive, as well as helping to maintain its relative importance. All things being equal, an anger that persists points to a greater transgression than an anger which rapidly fades.

Anger, however, was an energy that respondents frequently identified as needing to be managed, bounded or controlled in order to be able to integrate it in their professional practice in ways that would not destabilise it. The dangers that anger presented for journalists included three risks that were repeatedly cited: that it could cause one to lose sight of the (moral) facts, that it could be emotionally corrosive, and that it could pose institutional risks if allowed to pass into published news.

Losing sight of the (moral) facts

The first of these risks – losing sight of the facts – was understood as one in which feelings of anger might lead the journalist to be unable to reconsider their judgement on the story in light of new information. Read through Srinivasan’s aptness/prudence lens, this is a risk that anger might lead the journalist to fail to update their subjective moral assessment of the situation in light of facts that ought to require such an adjustment, resulting in an inapt, illegitimate anger. Three examples of this reasoning from respondents went as follows:

I think you should never allow that sense of injustice to cloud your judgment. […] No matter how pissed off I can be by a politician or a captured project, I’m always going to be reined in by the limits of the facts on the table, or the facts that I can accumulate. However badly I would want to expose a politician who’s been looting from public coffers for decades, I could only do so as far as I’ve got the facts available to me, or as far as I’ve been able to collect the relevant facts and I can prove it. […] And yeah, I think that’s always going to be the guiding light in terms of how you direct that feeling of anger, whatever you might feel.

Respondent 1

We have to constantly be checking ourselves in a sense. It’s very easy to, especially in this political climate, I think it’s very easy to just see heroes and villains, and to let your kind of emotion, or your political biases cloud your journalism. And we see it quite often on display in the press, I think.

Respondent 2

You’ve always got to be alert to facts that might start to change your opinion of what has happened, and so it’s great to use an emotion like anger to kind of drive you and do things, investigate things, using, like in [story], vast amounts of personal time and resources to do it that you just won’t get back, but you’ve also got to maintain that, it’s so important, that vulnerability, because otherwise, that’s where I think you can make some serious, serious errors in your work.

Respondent 7

Strategies for countering the attachment that anger can create would often invoke a distinction between the feelings of the journalist and the facts of the story under investigation. It would be tempting to read such responses as being examples of seeing emotion as simply an akratic force, distorting journalists’ understandings of the facts of a story in ways that would make being an (impossibly) rational journalist a professional ideal. Such a reading would be incorrect, however.

No respondents argued for a professional ideal in which anger was absent. The common articulation was, in fact, that being angry was normatively good and practically useful. Rather, anger was a feeling that needed to be kept in a proper relationship to the facts of an investigation. Specifically, anger was understood by respondents as being connected to a moral judgement, which itself followed an appraisal of the facts of the case. The proper place of anger, in this schema, is one in which feeling follows fact, and the job of the ‘good’ investigative reporter is to ensure that (i) anger is not allowed to interfere with the admission of new facts and (ii) that the feeling continue to track any changes in moral judgement that the facts of the case warrant.

This concept of anger’s proper place is articulated by Respondent 1 in their view that (metaphorically) “I am always going to be reined in by the limits of the facts on the table” and that the primacy of factual correctness is “the guiding light in terms of how you direct that feeling of anger.” Maintaining this proper relationship between anger and fact was something that required being able to do the work of updating judgements in response to new information. For Respondent 2, this was a matter of “constantly [checking] ourselves”, for Respondent 7, it was about maintaining a “vulnerability” to the possibility of being wrong in the judgements being made at any point in the investigation.

Understood in terms of an aptness/prudence dichotomy, the danger being described here is the problem that the moral judgement that anger goes hand in hand with is an unavoidably subjective one. It derives from the fact that there appears to be a moral violation from the point of view of the person feeling angry. For anger to remain apt as the facts change would require the angry subject to be open to continuous reappraisal of the situation and potentially feeling differently as a result (more or less angry at a larger, smaller or different set of people, perhaps). To refuse to do this work on the grounds that one is too angry to admit new facts or revise their judgment is to risk one’s anger becoming inapt. For investigative journalists, whose raison d’etre is the pursuit of (morally) condemnable action, to allow anger out of its proper relationship to the facts of the matter is to destabilise a fundamental element of the practice. It would be, in Respondent 7’s phrasing, to “make some serious, serious errors in your work.”

Burning up

Aside from concerns that anger might move out of its proper relationship to the facts of an investigation, respondents also frequently voiced concerns that the feeling could be harmful more corporeally. Examples of anger being understood as physically affecting included:

But sometimes, anger is one thing, there’s a more dangerous thing that happens. It’s exhausting Richard, it’s actually exhausting. And there’re times when you get into a bit of a funk and you say, “Fuck, is this actually really worth it?” […] And at times, besides it gets quite dark, it gets depressing.

Respondent 9

If you just get angry, you can get despondent about the state of things. […] It’s treated as a fair competition, in a way I think that helps one to not get just despondent at the state of things. If you have a little bit of a blood lust, I think it’s helpful in a way, particularly for investigative work in South Africa. I think you have to have that.

Respondent 4

I think you get to a point where you just have seen it all and yeah, I’ve seen just so much amount of corruption, so much injustice. I think you get to a point where you understand that the world is just not a just place. It’s just there’s just so much injustice. […] It doesn’t mean that you should not fight injustice, but I think you get to a point where you know it’s just how the world is structured.

Respondent 5

On these accounts, being angry can have material physical and psychological effects. These include a range of related states that are variously described by respondents as depression, exhaustion (R9), despondency (R4) or a dulled cynicism (R5). Complicating ideas of ‘anger as prudence’, this points to a shared concern that letting anger run unchecked can be (or has been) emotionally corrosive. Insofar as anger is a fuel, it is one best suited for short trips.

The link between anger and depression in respondents’ accounts was often given through a discussion of whether the work they were undertaking would/could change anything. In Respondent 9’s view, a consideration of “is this actually really worth it?” is central to whether feelings of depression or exhaustion manifested. Respondent 4 makes a similar point from a different, more optimistic direction, pointing out that seeing their work as a “fair competition” (in which it is implied victory might be possible) helps to ward off despondency. Even the cynicism of Respondent 5 reflects these concerns, with their pessimism being attributed to an understanding that the work is not making a difference in the grand scheme of things. That the ‘competition’, to borrow from Respondent 4, is not fair or winnable.

In these accounts, one strategy for keeping the emotion from transforming into despair, depression or exhaustion involves maintaining a belief in the possibility of addressing anger’s underlying moral object. That is, believing that what you are angry about might one day be remedied. Not all emotional strategies required this belief in the possibility that justice be possible, however, and not all abdication to an unfair system (as in Respondent 5’s case) automatically translates to despair. Respondent 8 offered an alternative account, in which the corrosive effects of anger at an “illogical” and “ridiculous” reality could be held at bay through black humour.

All my anger has always been tempered by humor. So at some point, because often the system is so illogical and so ridiculous, that to humiliate or show it up is the job of the court jester. And I’d luckily have, I’m not saying I think I’m a great, funny person, but for some reason, I’ve developed a sense of humour in order to deal with trauma, and to highlight the stupidity of it.

Respondent 8

Humour as a coping mechanism has a long history among journalists (and others) working in the face of traumatising and emotionally exhausting circumstances (Kotišová 2017; Pedelty 2013). While the specific psychoanalytic links between anger and negative feeling (depression, despondency, cynicism) are beyond the scope of this paper, there are two overarching articulations that bear reiterating. The first is an understanding of anger (for all its energetic effects) as potentially harmful where dealing with the injustice underlying the feeling is frustrated. The second is a shared understanding that work on framing anger and the injustice it is attached to forms part of mitigating its negative effects. Whether it is finding reasons to believe that the work makes a difference to the injustice being focused on or finding reasons to reinterpret an unfair world as “ridiculous” and “illogical”, journalists talked about needing to manage their understanding of the ‘moral game’ that investigative journalism is a part of.

Keeping anger out of the story

The existence of a professional norm against writing one’s own emotions into the story has already been remarked on (Stupart 2021a; Wahl-Jorgensen 2013) and it is unsurprising that respondents affirmed this principle in publishing their investigative work. Writing one’s own anger into copy can carry both professional risks to objectivity/neutrality and potentially significant material risks to one’s news organisation. In the latter case, accounts of how the subjects of investigations typically ‘pushed back’ against journalists frequently referred to legal intimidation (and defamation lawsuits in particular) as a risk that needed to be appropriately managed.

The potentially existential consequences of exaggerating the claims being made in investigative reports dovetail with existing norms of concealing journalistic emotion to sustain processes of vetting and de-angering investigative reporting. For the journalist, keeping their feelings out of their stories is a professional norm. For newsrooms, it is both this and a matter of keeping potentially litigious subjects at a safe distance. This de-emotionalising work can be performed right through the organisation, ranging from the journalist checking themselves as they write and rewrite to more explicit review processes of editing, fact-checking and legal review. Respondent 4 outlined these processes in an account which captures much of this interaction:

I think it also helps that we take a really long time to write and to publish. Sometimes I would worry [about] that if your first drafts went out. Because we spend so much time going through the evidence, […] reviewing a story with [editor] is literally a word by word [process]. If you get to a point where you’re like, “Well, I’m not sure about this.” because we don’t have publishing deadline, […] it’s very simple for us just to go, “You know what, let’s just put a peg in that and go away and think about it. And then let’s reconvene on this tomorrow.” […] So you might start off with a draft that’s a little bit shooting from the hip, but by the time you put your semi-lawyer hat on, when you’re going through the story and how you’re assessing evidence, and are we being fair, and can we use that word? Should we use a different word? […] So I think that that process helps a lot. Because you have more than one set of eyes on the story, which helps, it’ll go through me it’ll go through [editor], will go through [editor]. […] Then it’ll go through them again and again and again. So you have the opportunity to get a bit of space from it and to sit back and think, is that actually the right word? Are we safe to use that word? Is that fair for us to use that word? Should we use a slightly different word? I think that that process helps to cool any hot tempers

Respondent 4

In the case of a legal review of a story presented here, it is worth pointing out that while this is not an explicitly de-emotionalising process, it serves to create similar textual effects. Legal review tends to prioritise circumspection in the scope of claims being made, as well as removing or equivocating value judgements to only what could survive a potential legal challenge. In this way, legal/economic incentives on the part of the news organisation push news copy in the same direction as more individual approaches to managing emotional content often might.

Individual approaches to managing anger out of the final text included both practices of occasionally leaving stories to ‘cool’ before revisiting them, as well as soliciting the opinions of fellow journalists, fact-checkers and editors in a kind of good-faith, adversarial process that a story must transit through before being published. In a different newsroom, Respondent 2 described their version of this pre-publication sequence:

There’ll be an effort to, we have a robust fact-checking system, and every point in an article, at every point there’s colleagues and editors will try and punch holes in the story. And so, there’s quite a rigorous gauntlet it has to run through. And it only gets published if it can stand up to that.

These processes of rigorous internal checking, leaving material to ‘cool’ and having lawyers check specific claims all requires investigative work to take longer than other news beats. This was time that was typically afforded by editors on the basis that the work had particular value (for the potential traffic that a good investigative story could generate) and carried larger legal and other risks. In this way, investigative reporting tended to be privileged with the time and opportunities for the detailed, specialist reading required for appropriately screening the feelings and value judgements of journalists from their stories. This is not, of course, to say that investigative teams had no deadlines whatsoever. Rather, these were far more flexible than would ordinarily be the case for other journalists. As Respondent 13 explained a typical situation in their newsroom:

…our investigative work is a very big driver of subscriptions, so I’m aware of the fact that we need to produce regular, quality, investigative pieces because it’s both good for journalism but it’s also good commercially. […] So we try to maintain a balance between giving our journalists enough space and enough room, enough lead time, to investigate stories as they see fit, but as the editor, I remain in quite close contact with those journalists to make sure that we do work towards a deadline that’s both reasonable to them and reasonable and fair to the story. […] I’ll never ever publish a story unless I am 100% confident that it is as watertight as is humanly possible without being a police forensic investigator.

Concluding

This paper has been concerned with the question of anger in the work of investigative journalists. Specifically, how it might be productively theorised, what work it does for journalists, and what risks it carries. In the first instance, I have argued that rather than taking a naïve view of emotion as a kind of akratic failure to reason, it ought to in fact be understood as an information-bearing, reasonable response to cases of (often egregious) injustice.

Drawing on the work of Arpaly (2000), Strawson (2013) and Srinivasan (2018), I have argued that one can see in the reflections of interviewees an understanding of anger as a fundamentally moral emotion – one in which feeling closely tracks a moral evaluation of others’ behaviour. From this perspective, anger can be usefully understood in terms of both aptness and prudence: whether feelings of anger are justified and whether they are useful. Respondents’ views reflected an interpretation of this kind, including a view of anger as apt under certain conditions and as a productive ‘fuel’ or ‘energy’ that could drive the work forward if appropriately managed. Beyond the more specific claims around anger and its place in the work of investigative journalists made earlier, the notion that anger occupies a legitimate place in journalists’ work carries some further implications which are worth spelling out in more detail.

First, the fact that anger as a moral feeling occupies a legitimate (if bounded) place in the practice of journalists points to an inescapably moral dimension to the work. ‘Inescapable’, because for (at least) the investigative journalist, moral judgement is not simply present intellectually at the level of discourse, but in a more visceral way in how it feels to do the work. That is, investigative journalism wasn’t simply understood as moral work, it is felt to be so.

Relatedly, to the extent that anger is both an important component of the drive to do the work and a moral feeling, the ability to do investigative work well becomes bound up with the work of managing moral feelings. This kind of emotional work fits superficially with Hochschild‘s (1983) observation that certain kinds of labour requires the management of emotion in order to succeed at one’s job. Unlike Hochschild’s subjects summoning inauthentic feeling according to social scripts, however, journalists accounts of their feelings as apt indicate a widespread understanding of anger as an entirely authentic response to the stories they are working on. The emotional management required is directed at neither summoning nor banishing anger (in the pre-publication stages of the work), but in nurturing it. In keeping a justified, reasonable feeling at just the right level of intensity for it to drive the work without harming the one who feels it.

Finally, anger as a moral emotion might constitute – through feeling – a moral community between journalists and others who might feel as they do. In Lorde's (1981) phrasing, “[anger] is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.” Anger, like love, can do the work of creating community through common feeling, raising questions of its role in creating a justice-oriented journalistic ‘we’ in a more subtle way than, say, the constructed-as-outsider ‘activist journalist’ whose judgements inappropriately enter their stories. Anger as a community feeling occupies a space before the story, in which a community of feeling and common judgement can identify its members and assert its politics outside the view of readers. It becomes, in a sense, the professional equivalent of looking around a room and recognising who feels as I do in response to an injustice – despite the final published story appearing to carry none of those obvious commitments.

These comments should be understood as possibilities that emerge out of the reflections of the journalists interviewed here, for which much more remains to be considered. What I hope to have demonstrated, however, is the idea that anger is a central emotion in the work of at least this community of journalists, as well as the dimensions of aptness and prudence through which it can be fruitfully thought. This is an account of anger in the professional lives of investigative journalists that both makes clear the importance of emotion to their work, while fitting within existing observations about the absence of journalists’ own emotions in the texts produced and current theorising as to why this might be the case.