ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critique of what I call the ‘emotional intensification thesis of media’. This idea, held by both academic and popular thinkers and present in both scholarly and mainstream discussions, holds that developing media and media technologies intensify the emotional stimulation of those who use them. I work to complicate and refute this thesis on both empirical and ethical grounds. Using American newspaper journalism as an example, I show how technological and economic changes in the newspaper industry from nineteenth to the early twentieth century both intensified and decreased elements of emotional reportage. At the same time, I show how emphasising the supposed emotional intensification of media can reflect and amplify cultural stereotypes about race, class and gender.
