Interrogating empathy in two long form texts: a comparative textual analysis of trauma affect

Introduction

For decades, empathy was regarded as the antithesis of good journalism. Detachment, professional ‘objectivity’ and the story, at any cost, was the usual catch-cry. But as the detrimental impact on journalists of covering death, disease and destruction – three hallmarks of the trope ‘any bad news is good news’ – and indeed, as covering certain stories place their own lives in danger, this detachment is problematical to maintain and believe.

In this paper, I look at empathy through the pages of two long form pieces of Australian literary journalism, as well as epitextual materials swirling around them. Leigh Sales’ Any Ordinary Day (2018) and Troll Hunting (2019) by Ginger Gorman deal with grave and vexatious issues and notions; and both texts incorporate moments of overt life writing, intimate and profound. As such, empathy is used by these authors to write their subjects large, but concurrently, also to demonstrate their own vulnerability. And in so doing I argue that their credibility and the trust engendered multiplies exponentially. Through textual analysis, I demonstrate how different modes of empathy are narrated and used, as the authors broach their subjects – and themselves – through both traumatic and vexatious public spaces. Entirely different in concept, these two texts elevate the technique of empathy to deliver to their readership credible and trustworthy artefacts.

The texts

Any Ordinary Day, published in September 2018 by two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist and anchor of 7.30 on ABC TV presenter Leigh Sales, is a breath-taking glimpse into the 2014 horror delivery of her second son which shattered the foundations of her safe life and catapulted her into a world where she felt deeply uncertain and hesitant, both affectations unknown to her beforehand. In a quest to resolve the birth trauma of her youngest child, Sales seeks out other survivors of trauma, interviewing them up close and personally about how they kept going after their lives also were disrupted by a traumatic event. She does not place her own trauma on the same scale as those she interviews but concedes its affect is similar, but ‘. . . this is her attempt at dealing with her own brush with death; a gathering of tales about resilience, fears and vulnerability, interwoven with her sensibilities before, during and after the interviews’ (Joseph, 2019a: 45).

It is at once an inspiring and aspiring text, creating coherent narrative from trauma. Within these pages, Sales depends on her emotional empathy to sit with these survivors and ask the really hard questions. She also demonstrates the effect of compassionate empathy on survivors, discussing and interviewing several ancillary people from different professions involved in survivors’ stories. ‘These are the people who make all the difference. . .Much of her text is a grappling with what makes a difference to people suffering a traumatic loss; her discovery is this quiet empathetic approach’ (Joseph, 2019c: 46).

The second text, Troll Hunting by Ginger Gorman, published in February 2019, takes us into a world barely known by most; the cyber space of the worst hate speech and virtual bullying, resulting in real-life harm, sometimes suicide and death, and all too often these days, terrorist acts. Within these pages, rigorous research is laid out, side by side with verbatim exchanges – between Gorman and a handful of the world’s most infamous trolls; and again, personal exposure through first person reflection and narration. Here she demonstrates startling cognitive empathy as she attempts to see the world through the eyes of trolls. This text began when Gorman herself was trolled in 2013, threats against herself and her young family collateral damage of her journalism. Surprisingly, the cognitive empathy employed results in a form of compassionate advocacy empathy.

But first, a quick look at the definition and differentials between these three forms of empathy.

Empathy defined

The concept of empathy is an aesthetic mid-19th century one, derived from reactions to a piece of art or connection to nature. Massachusetts historian Susan Lanzoni writes: ‘Empathy is a relatively new English word. Anglo-American psychologists coined “empathy” as the best translation of the German Einfühlung (in-feeling) only in 1908’ (2018: 9). The psychologists were from Cornell and the University of Cambridge and drew on ‘. . .the Greek “em” for “in” and “pathos” for “feeling” and it stuck’ (Lanzoni 2015). She says that empathy is best understood as ‘our capacity to grasp and understand the mental and emotional lives of others. It is variably deemed a trained skill, a talent, or an inborn ability and accorded a psychological and moral nature’ (Lanzoni 2018: 3). Polemically, Riess writes: ‘In the past, empathy was considered an inborn trait that could not be taught, but research has shown that this vital human competency is mutable and can be taught. . .’ (Riess 2017: 74).

There are numerous broad definitions of empathy, the most vernacular simply to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. More formally, Decety and Jackson define it as: ‘. . .at a phenomenological level of description, a sense of similarity between the feelings one experiences and those expressed by others’ (Decety & Jackson 2004: 71). Elizabeth Fakazis claims that the critical and the practical value of the notion of empathy has been seriously underestimated in journalism (2003: 57). She defines empathy as a ‘deep understanding of a subject’s emotional and psychological perspective’ and argues that it has concrete pay offs for enhancing journalistic practice because it ‘can help journalists deepen their understanding, allowing them to not only observe what their subjects do but also why they do it’ (Fakazis, 2003: 46). McGoldrick expands:

For the journalist, rather than being asked to follow a prescribed set of ethical rules, mandating an unattainable aspiration to ‘detachment’, professionals can connect with, and trust, their most empathic human instinct to behave relationally, morally and ethically to inform and enlighten their audiences (McGoldrick 2011: 141).

Despite varying and incrementally differentiated definitions of empathy throughout the academy, there are three brands I focus on in this paper. Simply put, they are: emotional, compassionate and cognitive. Psychologist, author and journalist Daniel Goleman researches emotional intelligence theory, and attempts to mainstream notions of empathy. Cognitive empathy he explains as ‘knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking’. Emotional empathy is ‘when you physically feel what other people feel, as though their emotions were contagious’. The third kind of, compassionate empathy, is where ‘we not only understand a person’s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed’ (Goleman, 2008). Compassionate empathy is often linked to emotional empathy. As Riess explains: ‘Our capacity to perceive and resonate with others’ suffering allows us to feel and understand their pain. The personal distress experienced by observing others’ pain often motivates us to respond with compassion’ (Riess, 2017: 75). And as Silleson et al., write:

. . .research shows that the human brain naturally supports empathy, but that empathic responses increase as we gather more information about others. Narratives spark feelings of empathy in much the same way, which is why stories have the power to influence minds and motivate action (2015).

Through textual analysis, I will demonstrate how Leigh Sales and Ginger Gorman utilise these three forms of empathetic approach to render to the page and animate more viscerally their stories. I argue that Sales employs both emotional and compassionate empathy; and Gorman, cognitive and compassionate empathy.

Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales

At 264 pages, this seven chaptered hybrid text – narrative inquiry, reportage, and reflective practice – revisits seven ordinary Australians, ¹ whose lives changed through traumatic event, sometimes in a mere instant. These trauma narratives Sales calls ‘blindsides’ (Sales 2018: 1). Sales’ main query is how they kept going, faced with immense sorrow and loss, pain and suffering. The text is bookended by her own story: the first chapter narrating her near-death experience of herself and baby son, due to a uterine rupture in 2014 and his emergency delivery; and the breakdown of her marriage and undiagnosed neurological illness of her eldest son, the final chapter. But as Edwards writes: ‘Sales offers readers more than these interviews, sharing reflections on her own work as a journalist and her responsibility to the public’ (2018). With this added textual and analytical layer, Any Ordinary Day performs as an exemplar of empathetic interviewing technique and a mea culpa, holding a lens to professional mistakes she has made throughout her career, including several unethical decisions. She analyses these for her readership, coming to terms with the fact that she lacked empathy at the time. As Edwards points out: ‘For a public figure in Australia, this is rare indeed. . .with this added layer, it deserves close consideration’ (2018).

Sales uses various long form narrative technique throughout the text: dialogue, scene setting, changing perspective, second to first; back to second; into first again; with third person liberally enveloping most of the dialogue. There is meta writing around journalism craft and ethics, and neuroscience and trauma theory, verified at the end of the text in Notes, with defined explanations and references. The text begins in the second person, so immediately, the reader – you – is addressed:

The day that turns a life upside-down usually starts like any other. You open your eyes, swing your body out of bed, eat breakfast, get dressed and leave the house, your mind busy. As you close the front door behind you, rarely is there a tingle of unease that something is off. Later, when the story of what happened next comes to be told, it will start with the day’s deceptive ordinariness, something that will now seem incredible (Sales, 2018: 1).

The opening paragraph sends a resonant emotional empathic message – perhaps we have all had moments like this, not necessarily as monumental as the subjects in her text. But there we are, in the same pair of shoes. Delaney sums it up. The book is about: ‘. . .trauma, resilience, faith, grief and how people accommodate unexpected loss. It’s a moving and sensitive account of the profound and irreversible shifts in our inner life when tragedy occurs’ (2018).

Sales next writes about two such days towards the end of 2014 that were ‘ordinary’ to begin with; ‘two incidents that vibrated throughout the nation, binding us collectively in their thrall’ (Joseph, 2019a) – the death of cricketer Philip Hughes in late November, followed closely by the Lindt Café siege in early December – and these, coupled with her near tragic birth experience, set her wondering. She tells Guardian Australia: ‘The tool I reach for is just asking a lot of questions, trying to understand and drill down into it . . . I think I wanted reassurance that everything would be all right’ (Delaney, 2018). She does not shirk the hard questions; she begins by interviewing Louisa Hope who survived the Lindt Café siege, balking when Hope mentions her faith. Sales writes:

. . . my heart sinks. I flirted with religion in my late teens and early twenties but ultimately, I just couldn’t buy the dogma. It seemed irrational . . . No sooner do I have these thoughts than I’m irritated with myself. Who do I think I am, judging somebody in Louisa’s position? It’s presumptuous. I’m never going to learn anything useful if the first time somebody trusts me enough to let me into their thinking, I immediately close my mind to what they’re offering (2018: 17–18).

It is this self-effacing inside glimpse at the way Sales interviews which induces credibility. She regroups and asks Hope: ‘But didn’t you think, Why, God, why are you doing this to me?’ And as an aside to her reader: ‘I hope I’m not offending her with my blunt questions’ (Sales, 2018: 18). And this sets the pattern throughout with the narrative inquiry – reflection on her own positioning, shared with the readership; questioning her immediate response to what she is told and rather than imposing her own opinions, listening intently to her subjects; letting her readers ‘hear’ their voices. This is cognitive empathy – an attempt at understanding how the other person feels; honouring their real-life affect, without privileging her own, even if it challenges her own rational mindset.

Sales writes of her thought processes regarding the safety of her young sons; she crunches numbers and provides stats about the probability of being in a siege, or dying on a roller-coaster ride (Dreamworld, Queensland accident in 2014 when four people died) compared to dying in a car crash. This is not just a journalist writing; it is also a mother.

When she interviews Michael Spence, she cries. Spence tells her of his wife Beth’s death: ‘She was admitted to hospital on 28 November 2012. On the third of December she was diagnosed as having cancer in her back, bowel, liver and hips. And by the 22nd of December, she was dead’ (Sales 2018: 41). As an aside, Sales tells us it is the thought of the youngest of five children that breaks her. But she apologises to him for crying, and is ‘horrified’ at herself for doing so. She writes: ‘ . . . it feels self-indulgent and attention-seeking’ (ibid). The added personal reflection on her fragility is not mawkish; indeed, it creates authenticity. Again she regroups and asks him to go back to the very minute he was told of his wife’s cancer – the hard question. Spence like Hope is also a Christian. She asks him: ‘I don’t want any of my questions to sound judgemental, I just want to understand. . .do you literally believe God exists?’ (p. 46). With her question, she is again expressing compassionate empathy. She earnestly wants to see it from his point of view. Spence calmly answers, and Sales allows the space and time to try and comprehend. Spence advises to look for the ‘. . .commonalities of experiences. And how do you deal with it from within? You can try to see the world through the eyes of a particular person’. At this point Sales concedes that her research is worthwhile, but additionally, ‘there is going to be enormous wisdom and insight in the lived experience of others’ (p. 49). Again, this in essence is employing cognitive empathy to seek out others’ positions.

Two of the startling questions Sales asks Walter Mikac in a bid to understand his life after the Port Arthur tragedy are: ‘What made you think that life was worth carrying on? (p. 57); and ‘Twenty years on, what does grief feel like compared to what it felt like 1 year on?’(p. 60). To the first he says: ‘The thing that kept coming up for me was family . . . It was a sense that I really can’t do it. There’s been enough hurt here’ (pp. 57–58). And to the second: ‘A year on, you’re just functioning . . . twenty years on, it’s probably more like a surgical wound. You can see the scar’ (p. 60). At this, Sales admits she nearly weeps again. She writes of a nightmare she has the night before meeting Mikac for this interview in which he presented slumped and broken, as if he had a degenerative disease (p. 62). This, her sub-conscious depicting her appraisal of his suffering; emotional empathy, embodied in her sleep. As Riess writes: ‘Our capacity to perceive and resonate with others’ suffering allows us to feel and understand their pain. The personal distress experienced by observing others’ pain often motivates us to respond with compassion’ (Riess, 2017: 75). Sales’ tears, shed or withheld, demonstrate a state where she was envisaging the life of the other; the pain of the other. It humanises her beyond her identity as a journalist, I argue creating a more credible space around her daily reporting and interviewing to the nation.

In the third chapter of the book, Sales again directly addresses her readership in second person, before slipping back into first person narration: ‘While you’ve been reading this book, you’ve been putting your trust in me as a journalist, and to continue reading, you must believe that I have been telling you the truth . . .’ (p. 81). And then on the next page: ‘I have an acute understanding of how journalists behave from within the industry, but I have no idea how it feels to be the person at the other end of the story . . .’ (p. 82). Then Sales turns a harsh light on the journalism culture in the James Scott chapter. Scott describes how the media circus surrounding his survival affected himself and his family; Sales admits she would have asked the same questions that the late Richard Carleton asked him on a notorious and eviscerating paid 60 Minutes exclusive interview in 1992. She writes about public interest, a litmus test for thinking journalists while sourcing stories. She wonders to her reader: ‘This is defensible thinking for a journalist. Is it defensible thinking for an empathetic human being?’ (p. 99). And at this point, just below half-way through the text, Sales speaks of her professional mistakes in the field, and the shame she feels recalling them (pp. 99–104). She writes: ‘I can see that they were usually due to a failure of empathy’ (p. 99), clearly by the very nature of this text, a deficit she has worked on since.

When Juliet Darling talks to Sales, she speaks of two people who demonstrated compassionate empathy. Darling says:

If there were two people who were similar, it was the priest and the detective. . . They stood back and they listened and they asked questions and they waited for things to be revealed. They never presumed to know how I felt. They helped me because they trusted me (p. 121).

The singular act of taking dead sunflowers out of a vase and throwing them away, without being asked, is a memory Darling holds onto. It was the priest, Father Steve Sinn. He also said to her: ‘I don’t know how you’re going to manage’. Darling tells Sales: ‘Those were the kindest words. . .they acknowledged the depth of my pain and they didn’t try to push my grief away’ (p. 122). Sales writes: ‘By offering his own bewildered humanity, Steve Sinn allowed Juliet hers (p. 123). Sales claims that both Steve Sinn and Detective Graham Norris were completely different but ‘had one thing in common: empathy’ (p. 123). Without explicitly using the words, Sales explains the conflation of emotional empathy and compassionate empathy: ‘Both could put themselves in another’s shoes and at the same time maintain the detachment necessary to carry out their work’ (p. 123) – to help and support Darling. As Riess writes:

Empathy is a factor that draws individuals to helping professions and plays a critical role in understanding the nuances of others’ experiences. Empathy is a complex capability enabling individuals to understand and feel the emotional states of others, resulting in compassionate behaviour (Riess, 2017: 76).

There is another scene demonstrating this conflation of emotional and compassionate empathy. Darling collapsed on the floor crying when told that her husband Nick Waterlow’s body at the morgue would be cold to the touch. Instead of consoling her or enabling her not to go in, Father Sinn opened the door to the room where the body was, helped her to her feet and without speaking, accompanied her in. Darling tells Sales:

I went in and when I saw Nick on the gurney, I just stopped crying straight away. It was suddenly this incredible peace, this amazing peace took me over. Steve must have known, now’s the time to take her in, not to console or hug her (p. 124).

Sales interviews Sinn and Norris to find out how they knew the right things to do – how they practice their specific forms of empathy. Sales writes: ‘Like the priest and the detective, some people are blessed with instinctive emotional intelligence (p. 140). Turning to Riess again:

Empathy requires cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and moral capacities to understand and respond to the suffering of others. Compassion is a tender response to the perception of another’s suffering. Compassion cannot exist without empathy, as they are part of the same perception and response continuum that moves human beings from observation to action (Riess, 2017: 76).

When Stuart Diver survived the Thredbo landslide in 1997, his wife Sally did not. She was trapped with him, and drowned in front of him as water poured into their underground cage; Diver was helpless. Diver’s second marriage was 16 years long when his wife Rosanna, died of breast cancer. Sales manages the double tragedy by debunking any notion that Diver is ‘jinxed’ with stats; as she writes: ‘It was unusual for Stuart Diver to lose his first wife in a landslide but it was sadly ordinary to lose his second wife to cancer’ (p. 153).

When Sales is writing her chapter on the death of Hannah Richell’s partner Matt Richell, she is overcome with sadness. She writes: ‘If I’m telling this story matter-of-factly, it’s because I’m trained by years of practice as a journalist to do it that way. The truth is, as I’m writing these words, tears are streaming face’ (p. 199). As Fakazis writes:

Journalists have been criticised for being callous, for exploiting people to get a good story, and for writing stories that are high on sensationalism but low on respect for human dignity. Empathy is not possible without such respect – without the belief that the subject matters, that the subject’s motivations, experiences and worldview are worth taking the time to understand (Fakazis, 2003: 46).

Sales demonstrates her empathetic response with her questing words throughout this text, and as such, graphically depicts another side to the journalism craft. And I would argue, with this dual narrative – her subjects’ stories enmeshed in the process of gathering and writing them, sharing her emotional response to each – she creates ‘deeper, richer stories. Possibly “truer”’(Joseph, 2019a). Wakefield writes of: ‘. . .shadows that lurk behind the printed word . . . We journalists are trained by the custom and conventions of our craft to remain out of sight, pretending not to be there but simply to know’ (1966: 1). I think with her text, Sales interrupts this ubiquitous view of journalists, and in so doing, humanises herself and her colleagues – every time a disaster story or tragic event is written, it is also witnessed by the journalist, and affects her, on the day but also cumulatively throughout her career.

Troll Hunting by Ginger Gorman

Ginger Gorman arrives slowly through a haze of abuse and hatred, vitriol and fear to the epiphany of her 292 page text. Unlike Sales’ method of bringing emotional and compassionate empathy to her interviewing of trauma survivors, Gorman employs cognitive empathy throughout her practice, arriving at what would appear to many as an astounding compassionate empathy. It is through her transparent and methodical research into the netherworld of trolling that she lays out slowly and systematically how trolls come into being, perhaps even surprising herself; and what is needed to stop the evolution of more trolls.

It is a classically haunting encounter that delivers journalist Ginger Gorman into the invisible hands of some of the world’s worst internet trolls, leaping out of a collectively well-known journalistic imperative; an imperative often delivering to the public the best of social justice issues. Her job at the time was the ABC’s local radio Drive presenter in Far North Queensland. It was 2010, and Gorman undertook to tell what she called at the time an ‘untold story’ (Gorman 2019: 5). Demonstrating compassionate empathy – wanting to advocate for what she saw as a lack of understanding in the community – Gorman interviews many local LGBTIQ+ people about their lives and their loves. Of one couple, Peter Truong and Mark Newton, and their 5 year old son, she asks: ‘Do you think there was a suspicion that this must be something dodgy? There must be some paedophilic thing going on here?’ The men smile and agree with her that people probably think that, but add ‘We’re a family just like any other family’ (p. 7).

Two years later, Gorman writes, ‘[d]read encased me’ when she hears that the Queensland Police and the United States Postal Service were investigating both men. It was February 2012, and a little more than a year later, Newton is sentenced to 40 years’ jail and Truong, 30 years, for ‘conspiring to sexually exploit a child and conspiring to possess child pornography’ (p. 8).

Gorman addresses her reading audience when she writes: ‘You cannot overestimate the horror of the crimes’ the men committed against their small son from the age of 2 weeks. Detective Inspector Jon Rouse tells her: ‘Of the thousands of child exploitation cases I’ve been involved in, this will remain as one of the most horrendous breaches of a child’s trust by persons charged with their care and safe upbringing’ (ibid).

It took just 3 days for the trolls to find Gorman and begin a campaign that lasted for 2 years to shame her for her earlier article. ‘Your life is over’; ‘paedophile collaborator’; ‘you need to add pedophile enabler to your bio’. And in one, a rhetoric pin-pointing and subverting her own initial attempt at compassionate empathy in the advocacy stories she first reported: ‘. . .maybe she would’ve picked up on it if she was wasn’t so blindly driven by her own biases and prejudices’ (p. 9). And then – her young family targeted with a photograph of them altogether on the fascist website Iron March. Gorman’s parents were Jewish and fled the Nazi Holocaust; other family members were gassed at Auschwitz (p. 11). It was terrifying but as Gorman writes: ‘. . .despite the clear threat, there was no way to know if these people meant actual harm. We just had to sit and wait’ (ibid). Gorman waited and suffered the violation of constant anonymous and hate-filled messages, then when it abated, decided she had to work out why. She writes:

Who were trolls? What did they want? My original aim seemed straightforward. I sought to shine a light under the dark bridges of the internet, into its crevices . . . by 2015 I wanted to go directly to the source and write about what I found (p. 12).

Definitely not an empathetic inquiry at the time, this urge to find out is simply clinical journalism. But it slowly transmutes into a cognitive empathy as she researches and learns more.

The text begins with a Preface, and is then divided into three discrete sections: six chapters in Trolls; six chapters in Targets; and four chapters in Troll hunting. After each section there are ten pages of Notes in the margins in a different font: the first is What the fuck did you expect?; the second, White women are cancer; and the third, The hardest conversation of all – where Gorman interviews her husband about her writing, project and the danger these created for their young family. Bookending the text is Gorman’s Conclusion, followed by extensive endnotes.

This text is good, solid reporting. Gorman utilises literary technique judiciously, surrounded by expert interviews with psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists and academics. She transparently uses statistics and includes moments of life-writing as she entangles herself and inadvertently her family, in her investigation. She roams between acting purely professional to intimately personal, ‘where she questions her own sanity’ (Joseph, 2019b: 45). She interviews other reporters and specialists, and trolling victims and their families – and she interviews trolls, from all over the world. Gorman meets two Australian trolls and claims that not only did they have nothing in common, their perceptions of trolling are completely different: Craig trolls for political objectives; Mark for sheer entertainment. Mark tells Gorman: ‘Having morals in general is being soft . . . I find that humiliating people is fun but hurting them is hilarious’ (p. 12). Further on in the text Gorman writes that as targets of predator trolls, most people believe trolls are ‘ignorant, uneducated and alone’. Through her research she discovers these notions are myth, debunking any small comfort they may have furnished. As she writes: ‘This imagining serves to diffuse the hate, making us feel less afraid. What happens when we discover none of these things are true and he isn’t what we thought?’ (p. 41).

Discovering that the troll who ‘appeared to trigger the storm of predator trolling’ against her family in 2013 was anything but uneducated and ignorant, is unnerving. When the story of Truong and Newton broke, Robert Stacy McCain wrote a blogpost headed: ‘Neutral Objective Incompetence: How Ginger Gorham [sic] Aided Pedophile Network’, calling her report a ‘sunshine-and-rainbows narrative’ amounting to ‘free publicity for their criminal enterprise’ (p. 41). Gorman claims it took her 4 years to mount the courage to ask this man for an interview. She asks: ‘What is the protocol for emailing a man who you believe helped to create a tsunami of hate against you and your family, someone who made you feel unsafe?’ (p. 42). She uses rhetorical question to her readers and inadvertently appeals to a reader’s cognitive empathy – how would you feel if you were me? She has a short email correspondence with McCain but the promised Skype interview never eventuates. The rhetorical questioning of her readership is shored up by sparse parenthetical asides, where further questioning and information is divulged. An example is in chapter 15 where she writes an entire paragraph in parentheses: (Some days later, I bring up weev’s ² abuse and ranting with Mark. How weird the whole interaction was . . . ) (p. 224). This aside is a literary technique that enables an intimate space; a sort of whispering into each individual reader’s ear.

There is a questing in this text, a search for the reasons people become trolls. Her question: ‘How did he get like this? What’s motivating him? (p. 30) echoes through much of the text. Mark agrees to a de-identified audio-visual recorded interview, and Gorman reproduces much of what is said, before taking it to a psychologist to analyse. One of the more aggressive and personal attacks in this interview is when he asks Gorman:

Do you really believe the shit you write? You’re stuck in your social justice bubble and you can’t see the truth. There’s a big, big culture of cyberhate against men. Especially white men. Like I have less rights than you because I am white and male’ (p. 31).

After the psychologist, who also remains anonymous for professional reasons, analyses the interview there is a pivotal moment in the text when he tells Gorman:

These folk didn’t come from nowhere, and I would challenge the idea that they fell out of the sky as trolls. These are behaviours that were picked up over time, that were learned either through omission or commission, and in many ways people with challenging behaviours are a kind of mirror of our communities. If the flowers are growing a certain way, what’s happening in the soil (p. 34).

This evaluation and its analogy are early in the book but are the beginning of how Gorman begins to develop firstly a cognitive empathy of understanding eventuating in a compassionate empathy, mapping both onto her text.

The first of the three Notes in the Margin at the end of each section is a raw and personal tangent, part explicatory on Gorman’s own brand of transparent journalism; part memoir-ish on an incident with one of the trolls, and how she senses she is getting too close; how she is losing any semblance of objectivity. But it also goes to the heart of her growing cognitive empathy – she begins to care about some of these young men. She has learnt about how trolling and substance abuse – hard and soft drugs – are closely intertwined, and spends hours messaging with a troll who is withdrawing from Xanax. ‘These lost and angry young men,’ she writes. She asks herself the question: ‘These are trolls. What the fuck did you expect?’ answering ‘. . . not this dirty mess or fallibility. Not this crush of humanness’ (p. 56). And in this revelation, she begins a humanisation of the trolls for her readers, almost despite herself.

Later in the text, she claims another epiphany: that troll creation is really all about parenting. Talking to a notorious troll, who calls himself Meepsheep, about why so many young men seem to hate women, he tells her: ‘It’s so hard to figure this stuff out on your own. When you don’t have help’. He had already confided in Gorman that he literally grew up online, with no adult interaction. Gorman writes: ‘Right then I know in my core, in my spine, that perhaps more than anything else the story of trolling is one about parenting’ (p. 198). And here she demonstrates the process of empathic growth and its place in society that Riess writes of:

Empathy plays a critical interpersonal and societal role, enabling sharing of experiences, needs, and desires between individuals and providing an emotional bridge that promotes prosocial behavior. This capacity requires an exquisite interplay of neural networks and enables us to perceive the emotions of others, resonate with them emotionally and cognitively, to take in the perspective of others, and to distinguish between our own and others’ emotions (Riess, 2017: 74).

Accused towards the end of the book of desensitisation by Mark, one of the trolls, she includes his message:

I’m asking if you realise how desensitised you are now? A couple of years ago you were getting upset over rape jokes. Now you’re not fazed by me laughing about how my ISIS friends were drone-striked. . .you stopped questioning me a long time ago and now it’s friendly chats. You probably even think I am an OK person, in a way (p. 248).

Gorman is defensive but writes (not in response): ‘This feeling again. The sense that I am losing my footing and my clarity about what’s right and wrong’. And then self-doubt; this question, in italics for emphasis: ‘Am I saying I’m not desensitised because I want it to be true? Or because it is true?’

And then an extraordinary discussion with her husband Don; a discussion they both put off for a long time. About the years when she is trolled; when the family is threatened; when Gorman decides to find out ‘why’. Gorman asks him if he thinks her decision to interview trolls and write the book was bloody-minded and that she put the family – their two young daughters and him – at risk. He says yes, straight away. And then explains: ‘I was pretty angry. I thought to myself “why is she doing this? Why is she exposing herself? Why is she making herself accessibly to these people?”’ (p. 252). He talks of his mounting anxiety – that moment when he found a family photo on a Nazi website; that her Tweets are all geo-tagged, meaning anyone could find where they lived; and how it made him feel. He tells Gorman: ‘It was at that moment I understood how the boundaries between the virtual and the physical world were blurred. Until then I had never even contemplated that using such technology could have compromised our physical security’ (p. 251). This is a difficult section of the text to read – like we are eaves-dropping on an angry and intimate exchange – but her replies to her husband go to the heart of her journalism. Gorman says to him:

For me, it was a social justice thing. I felt like there was no choice but to investigate this story. Other women I knew were being attacked and the technology-enabled abuse was relentless. It was ruining their lives and nobody was helping . . .’ (ibid).

Not only does her reply instil an advocacy imperative to her work, but a compassionate one; having experienced cyberhate herself, she feels she has the means to at least attempt a remedy; to find out why; which makes her conclusion all the more interesting. In the last pages of her text, she writes:

I know in my heart more than my head that we can’t leave kids alone in echo chambers of online hate and then wonder why they emerge as socially isolated individuals full of rage. Why they believe the world is an inhospitable place. Why they want to hurt, isolate, damage and enrage other people – and laugh at them – the way they’ve been hurt.

It’s time to reach out our hands back across the cold water – not just to predator-trolling victims, but to the perpetrators themselves. Because we all live in the society that made them (p. 264).

When asked what the trolls think of the text, she answers: ‘They are actually really proud of the book. I went in [to the interviews] with a radical empathy and I really listened to them [trolls]. I don’t think we can solve hatred with hatred’ (Thompson, 2019). Gorman’s radical empathy is an inspired form of compassionate empathy, one she concedes is ‘controversial’ (ibid). I do not think she began her research with an expectation of compassionate understanding, but it is a clear and early path to it. Her cognitive empathy transmutes to compassionate empathy, and she tells us what needs to change, to change this behaviour, with suggestions for a bespoke independent statutory body with legal clout and making social media companies are more accountable.

Conclusion

These two texts are distinctly different but enshrine all three forms of empathy – emotional, cognitive, and compassionate – when dealing with traumatic conversations or incidents. Sales attacks her mission with a zeal, to better understand her world, which in a matter of a few hours felt unsafe, even treacherous to her – her daily reporting compounded by the near death traumatic experience of the birth of her second son. She seeks other people ‘blind-sided’ by sometimes just a moment, or series of moments, in their lives, and asks them about it; then listens intently to their answers, serving their traumatic experience and resolve up to her readership as a salve. Whereas Gorman becomes the centre of a vitriolic campaign of cyberhate and bullying – she could almost be one of Sales’ subjects, as her own trauma was intense – and attempts to write her way out of this space. Perhaps it was when the shock of the onslaught against her and her family began to fade slightly that her journalistic impulse took over. She claims a radical empathy from the outset, but I believe hers was really more a quest to clinically discover what makes a troll a troll – her empathy kicks in toward the end of the first third of the book. As Silleson et al write: ‘When we talk about empathy, we often talk about it abstractly, like it’s some emotional aether wafting about our insides. But empathy develops in tangible ways in the brain. . .’ (Silleson et al., 2015). Gorman grows into an empathetic affect as she learns more of the lives of the trolls she interviews – about the circumstances that initially contribute to their trolling.

Recently I argued that particularly in long form journalism, ‘transparent empathy is an effective and valid tool. . .’ (Joseph, 2016: 223). I stand by this statement – both these texts demonstrate that empathy, when employed authentically, is a method to enhance the breadth and depth of long form journalism, particularly around traumatic events. And through transparent professional practice, can inform and consolidate a greater public trust of journalists.