Publication Alert: Understanding Emotion in Concussion Media
Mixed feelings: Understanding emotion in media coverage of sport-related traumatic brain injuries
I had the opportunity to contribute a chapter to a forthcoming book called Head in the Game: Sociocultural Analyses of Brain Trauma in Sport. The book is edited by a fantastic group of Australian researchers led by Dr. Stephen Townsend (The University of Queensland) and includes chapters written by some of the top scholars in the field. The book will definitely be a groundbreaking collection and drops in June!
My chapter is based on interviews with scientists and journalists about the media coverage of concussion in sports. Here is the abstract:
Media representations of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in sports have been characterized by tensions between reports on scientific findings and stories about athletes experiencing the debilitating effects of brain injury (Ventresca, 2019). This media coverage has been widely critiqued for favouring sensationalized, emotional storytelling over more objective assessments of the latest scientific evidence (Kuhn et al., 2016; Stewart et al., 2019). This chapter considers these criticisms in light of what has been described as an “emotional turn” in journalism studies, whereby a growing number of scholars are examining how emotion shapes journalistic practices and audience engagement with news content (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020). As journalism’s emotional turn has challenged the assumption that emotional storytelling inherently represents a decline in journalistic standards (Dworznik-Hoak, 2022; Kotisova, 2019; Pantti, 2010; Pantti & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020), I explore how these insights can be applied to media representations of sports TBI. I draw on interviews with nine scientists and nine journalists that discussed emotion as materialising across two distinct domains of TBI media: the media texts themselves and the emotional labour of journalists – or what Kotisova (2019) calls journalism’s “front region” and “back region.” My analysis reveals that emotion performs multi-faceted – and sometimes competing – functions in TBI media and that norms of journalistic objectivity influence the emotional resonance of TBI stories. I argue for taking emotion seriously in TBI media as a pathway to deeper understandings of the sociopolitical dimensions of the “concussion crisis.”