Dr. Anita Varma is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at UT Austin where she focuses on media ethics. She leads the Solidarity Journalism Initiative at the university’s Center for Media Engagement. She received her Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University, and her dissertation, Solidarity in Action: A Case Study of Journalistic Humanizing Techniques in the San Francisco Homeless Project, received the inaugural Penn State Davis Ethics Award. Her research, teaching, and public engagement all focus on the role of solidarity in journalism. She believes journalism can help change the world for the better, and dedicates herself to helping journalists do their best work.
“The best journalism has always stood for people’s basic dignity. So solidarity journalism is when that commitment to social justice translates into the action of doing journalism that prioritizes the insights, struggles, and the needs of people for whom their basic dignity is at stake.”
Anita joins us today to discuss the mainstream media’s credibility crisis and how solidarity journalism offers a way forward for the media industry to build public trust, strengthen democracy, and better serve its audiences.
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She believes journalism can help change the world for the better, and dedicates herself to helping journalists do their best work.
In this conversation, DR. Anita Varma discusses her journey into journalism, the crisis of trust in mainstream media, and the concept of solidarity journalism. She emphasizes the importance of representing underrepresented voices and the need for journalism to serve the public rather than officials. Varma outlines how solidarity journalism can reshape narratives by focusing on the lived experiences of individuals, particularly those facing social injustices. She also highlights the challenges journalists face in expanding their sourcing networks and the political implications of their work. Throughout the discussion, Varma provides examples of journalists and media outlets that exemplify solidarity journalism, advocating for a more equitable and truthful media landscape.
First, what attracted you to journalism? How and why did you come to decide to make this your life’s work?
So I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and my grandfather actually came to the U.S. shortly after his grandchildren were born, and he subscribed to all the news. There was local news, there was national news, there was Indian news, there was Indian-American news, and that was really my earliest memory in childhood was seeing him not only receive all this news, but really pour over it every single day. These were very important deliveries. If it was snowing and something didn’t get delivered, he was always very concerned. And it made me curious from a very early age, what is so important in these pieces of paper? And as I got older and started to read them, I started to understand that journalism can make a tremendous difference in our understanding of the world and society beyond our day-to-day vantage points. The other thing that got me into journalism was noticing that there was very little representation of people like me. So my parents came from India, I’m an Asian American woman, and I rarely saw people like me in the news, unless there was something tragic or something scandalous going on. But noticing that disconnect has also kept me motivated to consider what other groups are minimally represented or underrepresented or not represented in news, and what could we do about that?
Anita, you recently published a piece in The Conversation, Mainstream Media Faces a Credibility Crisis – My journalism Research Shows How the News Can Still Serve the Public, which explores a very troubling problem that the media is facing, but one which also impacts the health of our democracy and civil society. According to research by Gallup released in October 2024, 54 percent of Democrats, 27 percent of independents, and just 12 percent of Republicans say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. These numbers are horrifying, especially with so-called independents and Republicans, but even for Democrats with just over 50 percent, it’s just not a great number. How did this cratering in trust in media happen?
That is an excellent question and I think there are so many explanations and frankly when I hear this range of explanations I tend to see some merit in all of them. So many discussions of this issue of a crisis of trust in mainstream news will start the attribution in 2000 when digital spaces started to exist and became more accessible.
Others will point to 2008 and argue that in 2008, the financial crisis that led to the decimation of local news has never really been restored in spaces that now are completely dependent on social media narratives, which really have reached their rising peak as of 2016. And so for some, I am not really sure why there seems to be an explanation every eight years, which would suggest that we’re coming up on another one. And we’ve heard some of that discussion at the end of 2024 arguing that there is now an alternative news or media ecosystem that is outside the mainstream, such as very popular podcasts and which are recorded here in Austin, Texas, where I’m based now, but that’s creating this alternate media environment and undermining mainstream media credibility. As I said, I think all of those explanations are plausible.
But the biggest one that I think we’ve not spent enough time considering are the groups and people for whom mainstream news has never been credible. And that dates back to 1827 with the publication of the first black run newspaper called the Freedoms Journal, where both black editors wrote, we wish to plead our own cause. And their argument was not that news should be biased in favor of Black liberation, but instead that news needs to be factual, that it needs to be accurate. And if we consider that from 1827 to 2025, that critique has never been adequately addressed by mainstream media. We hear that from news audiences and journalists within mainstream media alike. Then we can start to see that this problem of trust is reaching new heights and new attention, receiving new attention, but it’s not really a new problem.
Similar critiques come up from every minority group in America, including LGBTQ folks who very much point correctly to the really damaging and non-factual coverage of the AIDS crisis that discounted it, that treated it like a joke, because that was the Reagan administration’s stance at the outset. And also this ongoing issue of these attempts by grassroots actors to correct the record are then being treated as either fringe attempts or as as kind of rabble rousers or disobedient people. And so I think those longer standing threads really account for how it got to this point. And then the question becomes, what do we do about that, given that this is not a new phenomenon, this is not a matter of creating one new media space or having one more media literacy module, how do we get to the root of the problem and try to address it.
So what do we do about that? This is something that you’re actually working on. This is something that you at UT Austin as leader of the Solidarity Journalism Initiative have been working on with colleagues and students for the last few years now. First, how would you define solidarity and then solidarity journalism?
Yeah, so my work on solidarity journalism actually started when I was a graduate student at Stanford University and the Solidarity Journalism Initiative began at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics in 2019 and then I moved the work with me here to UT Austin in 2021. So it’s been a long, a long path with lots ahead. So solidarity as I define it is a commitment to social justice that translates into action and that commitment to social justice, you know, this word social justice has gotten a lot of strange connotations attached to it, but in a philosophical or ethics sense, social justice means quite simply dignity for everyone in a society. And the reason that I apply this to journalism and talk about it so much in the context of journalism is that the best journalism dating back even before 1827 has always stood for people’s basic dignity.
So solidarity journalism is when that commitment to social justice translates into the action of doing journalism that prioritizes the insights, struggles, and the needs of people for whom their basic dignity is at stake. And I think that’s really a game changer that journalism and particularly mainstream journalism would do well to do much more of so that people are not terribly over-informed about who Taylor Swift is dating, but terribly under informed about the struggles that are shaping some of the visible disjunctures we see among our neighborhoods and cities today.
Was there point in time where mainstream media kind of moved away from this approach and kind of became overly reliant on maybe commercial interests or let’s just say like a bias toward officialdom or just prioritizing public officials’ voices and opinions over those of the general public?
That is an excellent question. in the historical side of my research, I found that solidarity journalism has actually never been dominant in a U.S. context, but it has become more and more marginalized and I attribute a lot of that to this 20th century rise in a preoccupation with objectivity, where objectivity has become a word that also gets misused as if it means to quote the person with the most official power. But that person with the most official power has an agenda, has a subjective view on what’s going on, has a set of facts that they would prefer not to acknowledge. And yet that tendency and dependency on quoting officials and other elites with institutional credentials I think has led journalism away from serving the public. I think a lot of journalism, particularly mainstream spaces, does an excellent job of serving officials, but that’s not what journalism is for. Going back to the Pentagon Papers ruling in the 1970s, the Supreme Court said classically that the press is to serve the governed, not the governors. And yet we see this reversal happening in the years since. But I do think that these pressures felt institutionally and professionally by journalists where they can be fired, they can be denigrated as biased, or as advocates, or activists, as if these are bad words from their editorial management and publishers that leads into this dynamic where journalism may be very reluctant to step away from what they’ve been told will preserve their credibility. But the reason I push back on that is that their credibility, as you quoted based on those numbers, it’s not been preserved by this hyper-dependence on public officials. So if what we’re doing isn’t working, that speaks even more to the need to do something different.
Using a solidarity journalism model, how can journalists frame stories more effectively?
Yeah, so solidarity reporting really encourages and urges and directs journalists to do what the best journalists have always done, which is looking at what is happening on the ground. This is not a matter of what the mayor or the governor or even the president says is happening, it’s a matter of actually seeing and understanding and hearing from people on the ground to truthfully report what is happening. And so the frame would then be shaped by the reality on the ground. So if hypothetically speaking, there are officials who claim that the economy is just fine, the cost of living isn’t a problem, that people don’t have the right understanding of grocery prices and therefore the economy is doing great, a story framed around official definitions will not just quote those definitions, but will adopt as fact that it’s not anything to worry about. People’s cost of living is just fine. Whereas with a solidarity story, the frame would come from people who are facing the cost of living. So if they say the cost of living is just fine, then that would be still the frame. But very often, as we saw in 2024, there’s a disconnect where people are in grocery stores. They’re putting back groceries because they can’t afford what they previously could afford on the same paycheck or they are limiting the amount that they are driving because gas prices in some places are so high. These are not realities that officials are often keen to acknowledge. And so if the story is just framed around the official, we’re not gonna hear that, right? So solidarity stories would frame it around what people are actually going through. And again, if they’re not facing a problem that in some cases officials claim is a problem, that would also be right, the frame and the differentiation.
But really the starting point is talking to people impacted by issues potentially placing their basic dignity at stake. And that would include food, that would include clean water, clean air, and basic shelter. So these are really the brass tacks things we need that become the emphasis of solidarity stories.
So by potentially exposing disparities between what public officials are saying on the one hand and what people are actually experiencing on the ground, is there a risk of media organizations kind of alienating themselves from access to public officials? Is this necessarily a bad thing? Is access journalism necessary in order to do effective journalism?
That’s a great question. I think access journalism at a time, I could see the reason for it right if you have this unique relationship that affords you access to the decision-makers, you would not want to rock that boat I’ve heard accounts of that even from JFK’s era. So this is not a partisan concern, either, we hear those matters come up, regardless of who’s in office.
But in an era of social media where we see journalism turn its dependencies and efficiencies to looking at what public officials are posting on social media, I fail to see the benefits of protecting access over protecting truthful reporting, right? Because the officials’ capacities to post on social media, which by the way, many public officials prefer to go directly to social media because they don’t hold a lot of faith that journalists can get their message out or will get their message out the way that they prefer … In that scenario, the only access required is access to social media. And so I don’t see the justification of saying, couldn’t this alienate the officials? Because if journalism is to serve the public, then the goal is to truthfully report what the public needs, not what officials would prefer. This came up quite a lot in my early work in San Francisco, where many high profile public officials were making claims about homelessness to suggest that homelessness and housing affordability are unrelated. And that’s simply not true. Homelessness and housing affordability have always been related. And as of 2024, homelessness in the U.S. has reached the highest point in recorded history.
And that has everything to do with housing affordability. But this concern that if we report the facts of people who become homeless because housing is unaffordable, if that’s gonna alienate officials, I think it should, because officials are the problem in that dynamic. And so I think that journalism needs to be clear about who they stand with, what they stand for, and to keep the truth at the top of what they’re aiming to do. If it is to preserve access to folks that are not dealing or even aware sometimes of the realities on the ground, I start to wonder, then what is the value of that type of journalism?
Yeah, I think something like that also exposes what might be like a fallacy of attribution that journalists kind of saddle themselves with where, you know, just because they cite this statement to a certain official, that gives them the green light not to like push back or to challenge or to question … if you give them benefit of the doubt, assumptions or just flat out false statements.
Absolutely. And I think that this attribution tendency is something that journalists do sometimes in an effort of rigor, right? So they want to be sure that they’re attributing claims, that they’re being fair. And I think that that same logic applies to solidarity journalism, where it’s not the case that I would suggest, although journalists do face a terrible cost of living crisis because journalist’s salaries have decreased for the most part, but even if journalists are not facing the same struggles, you know, that it’s a journalist’s job to seek out sources and attribute factually what is going on for people when covering any story. So I wouldn’t suggest that journalists should know of their own accord. I think sometimes that gets difficult because just as, going back to your first question, you know, my family and I, we were limited to what we could see and experience from our own vantage point. I think journalists are similarly limited. But then the question is how can journalists expand that vantage point, it really starts with moving beyond official sources. So official sources may still play a role in journalism, but they should not be setting the agenda, deciding what relevant quotes are, and framing the stories. At that point, we’ve entered something that’s not really recognizable as journalism anymore.
Are there any efforts to help assist mainstream journalists get out of their own nsource boxes and to kind of branch out to more diverse community voices that you’re seeing right now?
Absolutely, and that has been a really great thing to see. I think one of the challenges that I hear a lot from journalists that would very much like to use these kind of sourcing resources is the pushback they receive from editors. Very rarely do I hear from a journalist who’s bothering to talk to me that they themselves don’t want to do it. It’s that they anticipate that their editors will push back because these are not the quote, usual suspects.
But the American Press Institute has done some phenomenal work around expanding sourcing networks and looking at who is getting sourced and who isn’t. There’s a group that was calling itself Women Also Know Stuff, and that was a network spreadsheet, I think it may have been more than a spreadsheet, but a network to help connect journalists to women who also have expertise, it turns out, although we are underrepresented in a lot of news.
And the organization Press On has been doing some fantastic work in movement journalism to try to get a more accurate and comprehensive view of social movements and grassroots efforts in the US right now, which often don’t have a single spokesperson, but how can those movements be more accurately represented in the news?
Yeah, it seems like this has been an issue for obviously many decades. I remember I did communications work for a group called the Florida Fair Trade Coalition, and we were organizing around the FTAA back in 2003 and there was a ministerial meeting in Miami and big protests. And one of the things that we tried to do is we kind of open up an office as a kind of information clearing house to connect journalists to kind of grassroots leaders and community leaders, not just from Florida representing different segments of civil society, but from around the globe who came to protest. Because what we saw was just a heavy reliance on like we talked about before, like government officials, trade officials, business officials, but you know, what we didn’t see were the voices of, you know, workers or farmworkers or, you know, campesinos in Mexico or Guatemala or throughout Latin America. Unfortunately, our office got raided by the police because they accused us of being anarchists, which kind of crippled our efforts a little bit. But yeah, mean, it would be great to kind of see more of that happening across the country, even as kind of like a localized constellation around maybe like certain, just certain issues in particular.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, surprise ending to your story, I’m so sorry that that happened, but I think this is real, right? That when journalists and community organizations start to include underrepresented voices, all too often, as a child I noticed that there was a tremendous amount of underrepresentation happening in the news media that I saw, and that was in the 1980s. But I think that as soon as these efforts to change that, to develop more equitable representation start to get any kind of momentum, we see a troubling and intense reaction from people for whom the status quo is what they would prefer, right? And I think sometimes I really appreciate journalists and journalism students, because they often bring a lot of idealism to the table. But I think there’s sometimes a misunderstanding that would suggest that underrepresentation is just, it’s been this oversight. We forgot to include more and different kinds of people. That’s never been the case in the United States. Underrepresentation is a political outcome of attempting to preserve a set of power dynamics that are not equitable or aligned with constitutional ideals of basic dignity for everyone. And I think the friction attached to doing that work to make a change is something that we all need to be cognizant will lead to the kind of crackdown that you and your colleagues experience, that journalists and academics and others are experiencing every day. And I think that only solidifies the need for more of these types of solidarity efforts to push back because someone said this to me recently, if it wasn’t terrifying to people with power under the status quo, they wouldn’t bother to push back so much.
What else should people know about solidarity journalism and how it can kind of help save us from not only the media crisis that we’re facing, this crisis in trust in media, but also the kind of political crisis that we find ourselves in?
Absolutely. I think that number one, I always like to highlight that solidarity journalism is not new. So solidarity journalism, I found examples going all the way back to the 1800s, just in the United States. And there’s more work to be done of looking at this in global context. But I think that the fact that solidarity journalism has had such a long and under-acknowledged history in journalism, speaks to its endurance and also the capacity. So I have a set of examples on the website for solidarity journalism that sometimes people find surprising because they assume that they’ll see kind of the news outlets with a very explicit connection or commitment to solidarity, but instead there’s news outlets on there that we would traditionally consider mainstream media.
And I think that mainstream media does have the capacity to do solidarity reporting and has received awards for doing so. So number one is to highlight the fact that solidarity reporting is not some new innovation. It’s not something that is really different and far removed from regular practices of journalism. But it is a question of priorities and emphasis that come across.
And I think that that really dovetails into the second part of your question, which is how solidarity journalism can help address the current political realities that we face as a nation. Growing up in Pittsburgh, I still have lots of connections there, and the biggest thing I’ve understood, which I don’t often see political elites acknowledge enough, is how much people struggle to make ends meet. And I think that that lack of acknowledgement among some political officials leads to this intense sense of alienation on the ground. And the more that politicians and people with political power can align themselves not with what they think that people should think, but what people are actually going through, I think that really is what politics are meant for, right? We don’t elect people just for the fun of it. We elect people because we have some beliefs that they can serve our needs. And I think that I know Jimmy Carter passed away that that’s part of his legacy of building the houses of actually grabbing a hammer as they say. And I think that push is really aligned with this ethos of solidarity. One of the most frustrating things that I saw in the peak of election season was this dependence and intense over quoting of Harvard trained economists who somehow were being positioned as if they know more about grocery prices in Pennsylvania than people paying for groceries in Pennsylvania. And I think that those disconnects are felt and recognized by people who don’t study journalism all day like I do. But making that chasm, well, removing that chasm is really the ideal, but making that chasm as small as possible between what people actually struggle against and what journalism represents and what politics are talking about, I think that’s going to be pivotal for moving forward and moving forward in a way that we can coexist as a country that understands that vulnerable people who are struggling, it’s not a with us or against us question. It’s a matter of basic dignity.
One of the parts of this political crisis we find ourselves in or within this new political reality is that we now seem to be in this kind of post-truth world where we can’t even agree on a certain set of facts. Is there a way that solidarity journalism kind of helps address and overcome this?
I believe so. So, my biggest faith in solidarity journalism comes from the fact that material reality still exists, right? Whether or not you have a place to sleep tonight, and in many parts of the country right now, it’s freezing cold outside. Whether or not you have a place to sleep tonight that is safe and warm, and you know where you can sleep tonight, that is not a question of interpretation. That is a fact.
Either you do or you don’t.
And I think that’s where solidarity reporting takes journalism, which is really where journalism can do the most good. I tend not to buy into this idea that journalism can, should, or would be able to come to reconciliation about the biggest debates of our unanswerable times. But this question of how does homelessness affect people in some of the richest parts of the country?
Why is that happening and what do people facing these freezing temperatures with nowhere else to go, including with school children, people with full time jobs, elderly people, you what do they need and how can the rest of us who may have somewhere to sleep tonight, and we know that with every confidence, how can we support their needs? That’s just one example. I think that, you know, other examples relate to food, the impact of climate crisis, you know, with all of this misinformation and disinformation about the hurricanes that happened in late 2024, I think the more that news coverage was able to talk to people who were actually impacted to understand what the impact has been on them, the more credible those accounts become, right? And it’s not the case that we want to hear from people who they think is controlling the weather. It’s that we want to hear from people what it is they’re facing and what they need and what has been provided and what hasn’t been provided. So I think really, going to the ground level to understand this, the third example I’ll give, which is always a painful one, is with COVID, know, these disputes that started to happen over whether COVID is real or not. The only evidence I needed was my dear friend Kimmy Nguyen, who died in April 2020. She was a public school teacher in New York and one of her students asymptomatically spread COVID to multiple teachers and Kimmy passed away. So that also is not an interpretation. That person had a full life ahead of her and is no longer here. And so I think that when we get into these political battleground interpretations and partisan lenses, we start to lose the plot in journalism because journalism is not about who interprets what, it’s about what are the facts of the matter. And so we need to talk to the people who know the facts of the matter.
who know the reality of the damage, the stress, the struggle that gets created when we don’t have what we need for our basic survival.
And before I let you go, Anita, who are some journalists and what are some media outlets and podcasts that you think do a good job at practicing solidarity journalism?
Oh, there are so many I am happy to say. So I will offer the caveat that journalists often change where they’re working. So let me name some names without offering any inaccurate institutional affiliations. But the first person who comes to mind her name is Tahera Rahman. And I first encountered her at KXAN, which is an NBC affiliate here in Austin and now I believe she’s at the NBC affiliate in Dallas. She has done some phenomenal solidarity reporting about issues ranging from housing to the Middle East to other social inequities facing people in Texas. Others would be Cecilia Lei, that’s L-E-I, and she has done really fantastic reporting about Asian-American communities in the Bay Area, particularly around the attacks that they had faced and continue to face related to xenophobia and physical attacks on seniors. Texas Tribune has some phenomenal reporters as well. Uriel Garcia is an immigration reporter who has also extensively covered Uvalde both during and long after the shooting and the impact that it’s had on real families, not just the talking points that elected officials may use or misuse. And there’s so many more. Every time I come across examples, I try to highlight them on the Solidarity Journalism website. So we have a full list of examples there and with links to where they come from.
In terms of news outlets, I should keep going with journalists, but I’ll mix them now. Outlier Media is based in Detroit, and they have a housing reporter … Aaron Mondry has done really fantastic reporting, both about how tenants are organizing in Detroit and about the ways in which a tenants union does not resolve all the problems of low income and unstable housing, right? And sometimes I really respect this emphasis on solutions, but sometimes solutions focused reporting can overlook this question of, well, did the solution really lead to resolving this matter in a lasting way? And I give Aaron so much credit for going back. And that’s a big act of solidarity to go back and see what people are still dealing with. And it turns out those unions did not end the issue and in fact may lead to further challenges for those tenants. Outlier media, absolutely. Street Spirit is another news outlet that I would be very keen for more people to know about as aligned with these solidarity questions. And there’s always more coming up. I think that’s the other really great aspect of the media environment right now that for every sad news report I see about local news deserts, there’s another 10 digital-only news startups that are gonna save us all. The other one I wanted to shout out is called 285 South.
And they’re based in Georgia and focus on Metro Atlanta’s immigrant and refugee communities. And they also, as I understand it, are a very small organization, but they do tremendous work talking directly to immigrants and refugees in the community. Again, getting away from the talking points where our own lives can become unrecognizable to us.
And that is an inexhaustive list, but on the Solidarity Journalism website, is mediaengagement.org and then you’ll see the link to Solidarity Journalism, we have an ongoing list of examples that’s updated all the time.
Great. Well, Anita, thanks so much for the work that you’re doing at the Solidarity Journalism Initiative, which we’ll link to in the show notes. And thanks again for coming onto the signal.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
SOLIDARITY JOURNALISM RESOURCES:
- The Center for Media Engagement – Solidarity Journalism
- Mainstream Media Faces a Credibility Crisis – My Journalism Research Shows How the News Can Still Serve the Public, by Dr. Anita Varma
- Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company, by Alice Driver
- The Defender Handbook, by The Kansas City Defender and the Reynolds Journalism Institute
- Tahera Rahman
- Cecilia Lei
- 285 South
- The Texas Tribune
- Outlier Media
