I’m a professor of journalism and media, and I consider my analysis provides a method ahead for journalism to construct credibility: solidarity journalism.
What’s solidarity journalism?
Solidarity, as I outline it, is a dedication to folks’s primary dignity that interprets into motion.
Since 2014, my tutorial analysis has targeted on the position of solidarity in journalism that represents marginalized communities – like people who find themselves homeless, face meals insecurity or are the targets of violence. These are teams who can not merely decide out of the circumstances inserting their survival and security at stake.
Few journalists, by the way in which, use the label of “solidarity” to explain their practices. As a substitute, my analysis reveals, solidarity emerges in how some journalists do their reporting.
What’s newsworthy?
Journalists often know their editors shall be searching for just a few easy standards. A robust story pitch often consists of novelty and folks with institutional energy. It feels vital when weighed in opposition to different occasions occurring on the identical time.
It’s straightforward for the president to get the media’s consideration. It’s more durable for an everyday particular person to get their story informed.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Pictures
A narrative printed by Outlier Media on March 8, 2023, illustrates this method. Headlined “Detroit tenants are organizing and making bigger demands,” the piece focuses on tenants’ struggles for easy wants like functioning sewage methods, scorching water and electrical energy.
The president might by no means challenge an apology for a metropolis neglecting its poorest residents. And journalists reporting in solidarity don’t anticipate elite recognition. They consider that when folks’s primary dignity is in danger, it’s a subject price reporting.
Dealing with of sources
Sources are the folks, establishments and knowledge that journalists use to offer proof in reporting.
Within the worst circumstances, marginalized sources describe reporters as hostile, transactional and extractive. Such journalists “parachute in” to cowl an enormous story and seize quotes and wrenching photographs of tragedies. Then, they disappear as abruptly as they arrived.
Journalists reporting in solidarity do their jobs in a different way.
They present up on the scene of an unfolding challenge not just for the story however for the folks affected. They spend time listening to folks experiencing the difficulty and return after a narrative has run to proceed the dialog – significantly when the struggles persist.
Reframing the narrative
Framing in journalism refers to how a narrative is informed. It isn’t potential for journalists to incorporate each potential supply or each side of a difficulty. Frames form who and what matches right into a story.
Solidarity journalists middle the views of the folks residing the information, like residents of razed homeless encampments.
AP Photograph/Wealthy Pedroncelli
Solidarity framing prioritizes the people who find themselves residing a difficulty that locations their primary dignity at stake on account of components past private circumstance or unhealthy luck. Solidarity framing defines points based mostly on what folks experiencing these struggles know – and know they want – by firsthand expertise.
This story, printed in CalMatters on Aug. 12, 2024, accounts for what folks affected by tent bans are experiencing firsthand. It illustrates the unattainable state of affairs dealing with individuals who have nowhere else to go.
In solidarity framing, official sources aren’t choose and jury. As a substitute, marginalized folks’s direct accounts form protection of what they’re going by.
True public service
My interviews and interactions with journalists since 2014 discover {that a} subset of mainstream journalists quietly do solidarity reporting already. They inform grounded tales of marginalized folks’s struggles and prioritize these firsthand accounts over the messaging promoted by folks in energy.
I consider this mannequin ought to be central to how journalism envisions its function and public service. And I’m not alone.
Many different teams, from progressive activists to conservatives, have indicated that they’d discover a solidarity reporting method extra credible than present reporting practices.
Mainstream media “could do a way better job of bringing in … folks who are actually on the ground experiencing this in real time and who were fighting to stop this in the first place,” one social justice activist informed me in 2023.
Conservatives, in the meantime, object to what they see as distorted protection of their communities.
By solidarity practices, mainstream media has an opportunity to attain what it has all the time claimed to contribute to society: truthful reporting based mostly on what is occurring on the bottom, to actual folks, in actual time – and with actual influence.