As Trump Prepares to Take Office, UT Professor Says Journalists Should Take a New Approach
Solidarity journalism puts vulnerable people first
By Austin Sanders, Fri., Nov. 29, 2024
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Dr. Anita Varma was working on her doctoral thesis on solidarity journalism. Now, eight years later, as Trump prepares to take office for a second term, she has become a foremost expert on the subject and is currently writing a book about it.
But what is solidarity journalism and why is it relevant to either Trump administration? It’s an approach to storytelling, Varma said, that could have better illuminated concerns from voters in the presidential race, had outlets leaned into it. Moving forward, she said it will be crucial to track the damage inflicted by new, draconian policies proposed by Trump.
Varma – an assistant professor in the University of Texas’ Moody College of Communication – first offers a basic definition of solidarity: “a commitment to social justice that translates into action.” The action in the case of journalism, she says, is reporting. But not just reporting on issues typically associated with the concept of political solidarity, like labor or social justice.
“This kind of reporting is not just about social justice issues,” Varma said. “It prioritizes and really adopts the concerns and struggles of people whose basic dignity is at stake.” That includes needs like food, shelter, health care, and others of basic economic survival. From Varma’s perspective, these kinds of issues clearly motivated voters during the 2024 election even if they were not the emphasis of mainstream news coverage throughout the election.
A solidarity approach to journalism, Varma said, flips the usual starting point of journalism. Whereas, traditionally, journalists treat “officials” – elected leaders, government officials, nonprofit and private sector executives – as agenda setters when it comes to news, solidarity journalism seeks to start with the people directly impacted by the decisions various officials make.
“The way that solidarity reporting gets to truth is not by looking at the podium or looking at the state’s agenda,” Varma said, “but by looking at what is truthfully happening on the ground based on the people that it’s happening to.”
During the 2024 campaign, economists – among the class of experts that journalists typically cite as sources for news stories on how economic conditions affect voters – pointed to low unemployment rates, better stock market performance, and lowering interest rates as signs that the national economy was improving and thus would be favorable to President Joe Biden. But the inflated price of groceries, the cost of gas, and increasingly unaffordable housing costs that people were facing on the ground painted a different picture – one that, ultimately, was favorable to Trump.
Varma referenced the work of another scholar, Sally Scholz at Villanova University, who has studied social vulnerabilities, part of which includes the shifting nature of such vulnerabilities. Varma pointed to University of Texas students who were subjected to a severe law enforcement crackdown in April for demonstrating against Israel’s bombing of Palestine. Those students, Varma said, may not fall under the typical classifications of social vulnerability (food or housing insecure, for example), but as they were hurt by agents of the state and arrested without merit, they were certainly vulnerable.
“Solidarity reporting looks more at the setting and the context of how these vulnerabilities are created,” Varma said. “Even if in a month’s time, those vulnerabilities may not be the same. We can apply this thinking to issues like basic access to food, clean water, clean air, shelter, clothing, and safety.”
Journalists should strive to create a news ecosystem that operates under that framework, she argues. Especially under a Trump administration, where people already facing social vulnerabilities may be under even more threat – and where different groups may be under more severe levels of threat at any given period of time.
If Trump carries out mass deportations as he promised during his campaign, undocumented immigrants (and their children) will be most threatened. If Trump continues to demonize trans people, as he did during the campaign, trans people will be under threat. If he empowers the anti-abortion movement to further restrict abortion rights, women will be more under threat.
When thinking about how solidarity journalism can help people under threat from a second Trump administration, Varma pointed to a writer in the Bay Area she interviewed in 2016. Tim Redmond, who founded a San Francisco-based publication called 48 Hills, told Varma the name came from the fact that there are 47 hills in San Francisco and that “in social justice work, there is always one more hill to climb.”
“In solidarity and through solidarity journalism,” Varma said, “we can see how we’re not alone in trying to climb that next hill.”
Editor's note Wednesday, Nov. 27 10:40am: A previous version of the story incorrectly identified Sally Scholz. We have corrected her name. The Chronicle regrets the error.
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