An unnatural split: how ‘human interest’ sucks the life from significant news

Abstract

Human interest might be considered the earliest of the news values, and in the past century, it has been the most flexible, allowing journalists to report and present compelling stories that lie outside more formal news definitions. In this historical and longitudinal analysis of 75 journalism textbooks from 1894 to 2016, I argue that human interest has also been a central enforcement tool for the dichotomy between emotional ‘feature’ stories and rational ‘news’ content – a dichotomy that developed in service of the modern journalistic tenet of objectivity. Whereas news and human interest were nearly synonymous in turn-of-the-20th-century textbooks, the two concepts were soon separated to facilitate the erasure of feeling and emotion from the most significant news events of the day. A key implication of this historical rupture is a century of public affairs news that holds citizens at arm’s length, contributing to widespread detachment from the workings of government and disengagement from civic affairs.