The power of empathy is reshaping our world — outside traditional media, at least. The taglines of the big social movements of the past decade — Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Voice-Treaty-Truth — are all proudly, openly, bottom-up demands for recognition and respect.
Yet as empathy trends, journalists recoil. It’s been distorted by a nasty antipathy that the craft’s dominant tabloid populism has nurtured, hidden behind the cool pretence of objectivity with a formulaic both-sides balance.
A demand for empathy has become the go-to campaigning response to our understanding of intersectionality — all those ways that overlapping layers of discrimination and privilege shape our different identities.
It’s now central to the popular discourse of emotional intelligence — the ability to manage your own emotions and understand the emotions of others — which exploded off the back of Daniel Goleman‘s 1995 book of the same name. Its conscious practice is step one in human-centred design, which through Stanford University’s D.school has come to be the intellectual operating system for innovation in the global digital transition.
But for too many journalists, it feels somehow too squishy for a craft that puffs itself up with a prideful hard-boiled cynicism. Sure, we are happy to be caught up in the emotional contagion (and the audience boosts) of a natural disaster or a deeply human tragedy — when it’s close enough to home. But once blinded by our own transcendental identities, it suddenly becomes too soft-hearted, too much like, gasp, bias!
It’s a fight that keeps roiling journalism like the continuing fight that started at The Washington Post between its editor Marty Baron and journalists of colour Wesley Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.
Emerging from 19th-century German literary aesthetics (as einfühlung, or that sense of feeling your way inside a work of art), the concept travelled through the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung (of course) into our modern English-language adaptation of the originally Greek “pathos” to describe feeling our way outside ourselves into the experiences, the lived journeys, of others.
Sounds like what good — great — journalism should be.
Across the late 20th century, research has concluded that it is a learned skill; “cognitive empathy”. Journalists have long incorporated plenty of these skills into our news-gathering practices, with all those head-nodding verbal and non-verbal ticks that suggest we’re listening, understanding, on their side. The problem is that without follow through, as Janet Malcolm skewered the craft in “The Journalist and the Murderer”, these ticks are more readily identified as con artist’s tricks by a more media-literate society.
Instead, too much of journalism has embraced the newsworthy drama of the populist resentment — the antipathy — that is pushing back against “the requisite empathy of love to break through the prejudice, contempt and yes, violence, of the past” (as Noel Pearson wrote in his Boyer lecture just 12 months ago).
In part, it’s the domination of the kick-down News Corp tabloid style, part the perceptions of the clickbait newsworthiness of the nasty punch over the out-reached hand, and part a jemmying of the empathy-antipathy pairing into a noxious both-sides rendering.
It’s also changing journalistic practice: it’s the fear of appearing too empathetic — too soft — driving the deliberate semiotics of formulaic disrespect in the now near-universal aggressively interrupting interviewer style.
Saturday’s announcement that Tracey Holmes is departing the ABC is a reminder that some of the most powerful interviews get more out of the empathy of silence and space — of listening — such as her unforgettable 2007 interview with NRL coach Wayne Bennett (which unfortunately no longer appears to be online).
Or take the ABC’s Australian Story, which strips the interviewer out of the story to tell the story of people usually outside the news cycle, or, inside the cycle, the skilfully slow reveal (some more successful than others) of Annabel Crabb’s Kitchen Cabinet.
Twisted by a resentful antipathy, empathy can quickly turn parochial, even bigoted — a weapon seized from the weak and turned to the benefit of the strong. Since the Voice vote, much of the media commentariat has leaned on its ideals to demand “respect” for majority voices as the much reported but little republished open letter from First Nations peoples said of the establishment’s lauding of the majority non-Indigenous No vote for it’s “nobility”.
Meanwhile, Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke was pushing back against the selective empathy that has characterised much of the reporting and commentary out of the Israel-Hamas war, saying “the concept of competitive grief, which … has driven some of the media, is something that I don’t want to see in Australia”.
Given yet again a choice between the warmth of empathy and the cool of political analysis, Australia’s media leapt to its safe place: “Labor split”.
