Mainstream media faces a credibility crisis – my journalism research shows how the news can still serve the public

Solidarity framing prioritizes the people who are living an issue that places their basic dignity at stake due to factors beyond personal circumstance or bad luck. Solidarity framing defines issues based on what people experiencing these struggles know – and know they need – through firsthand experience.

A solidarity framing of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order to remove homeless encampments sounds like this: “‘We gotta be somewhere’: Homeless Californians react to Newsom’s crackdown.”

This story, published in CalMatters on Aug. 12, 2024, accounts for what people affected by tent bans are experiencing firsthand. It illustrates the impossible situation facing people who have nowhere else to go.

In solidarity framing, official sources aren’t judge and jury. Instead, marginalized people’s direct accounts shape coverage of what they are going through.

True public service

My interviews and interactions with journalists since 2014 find that a subset of mainstream journalists quietly do solidarity reporting already. They tell grounded stories of marginalized people’s struggles and prioritize those firsthand accounts over the messaging promoted by people in power.

I believe this model should be central to how journalism envisions its purpose and public service. And I’m not alone.

Black people have for centuries called for more factual reporting that reflects their actual lives, because mainstream news has long criminalized and dehumanized their communities. Trans people have similarly called for more on-the-ground reporting as a way for journalism to improve its credibility.

Many other groups, from progressive activists to conservatives, have indicated that they would find a solidarity reporting approach more credible than current 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 told me in 2023.

Conservatives, meanwhile, object to what they see as distorted coverage of their communities.

“There’s a lot of different kinds of conservatives, and they just lump them all together as the right-wing extremists,” said one conservative news reader in a study by the Center for Media Engagement.

Through solidarity practices, mainstream media has a chance to achieve what it has always claimed to contribute to society: truthful reporting based on what is happening on the ground, to real people, in real time – and with real impact.

Anita Varma receives grant funding from Democracy Fund for research on solidarity journalism.