Abstract
The term 'emotional pornography' refers to explicit representation of human emotions in the news. Purpose of this representation is to elicit emotions in the spectator in order to attract his or her attention, much similar to pornography, which aims to elicit sexual arousal.
The article argues that this phenomena can be understood in context of a struggle for attention between news providers, the weapon of this struggle being empathy. Rodrigo Uribe and Barrie Gunter call this paradigm of news production 'sensational' news.
It can be also described as 'emotional paradigm' in the news, compared to 'informational paradigm' through which the news production is often understood among general public and news producers themselves. The term 'emotional pornography' derives from the term 'war pornography' as used by Jean Baudrillard and others.
Much similar to 'war pornography', the 'emotional pornography' can lead to exploitation of individuals who become content of news production. Therefore the body of the spectator is where the economical struggle between news producers takes place.