Anita Varma

• University of Texas at Austin

This study contributes the first experiment (n = 1,342) comparing audience reception of solidarity reporting to monitorial reporting. Solidarity reporting prioritizes insights of people impacted, while monitorial reporting focuses on officials. We find that covering abortion access protests using a solidarity approach improved news story credibilit...

The question of what constitutes solidarity (and what does not) has been a persistent concern for feminist scholars. In this conceptual article, we develop a distinction between superficial feminist solidarity and substantive feminist solidarity, grounded in illustrations of digital resistance during the transnational “Woman, Life, Freedom” feminis...

News coverage often uses stigmatizing language to label marginalized groups. Person-centered language has been discussed as a potential remedy, which this study tests for the first time. Using a between-subjects experiment with members of three marginalized groups ( n = 339), we investigate whether news articles that use person-centered terms (e.g....

This study positions social justice activists’ objections to dominant reporting norms as a catalyst for critically reassessing these norms and their connection to diminishing trust in US journalism. Based on a conceptual application of discourse ethics to journalism and qualitative analysis of 28 in-depth interviews with social justice activists, w...

Attacks on journalists have become a growing concern in democracies around the world. Past scholarship suggests that such attacks could lead to a chilling effect of journalists self-censoring their reporting. However, there is limited empirical work that substantiates the effects of attacks on journalists. To empirically test the existence of chill...

A dominant monitorial reporting method means that journalism shines a spotlight on officials’ activities, plans, and statements. While this reporting method has brought official wrongdoing to light, monitorial reporting has also participated in amplifying, emphasizing, and normalizing problematic official definitions that neglect structural factors...

Solidarity is a longstanding, though seldom acknowledged, news value in coverage of marginalized communities. As a principled commitment to social justice, solidarity as a news value helps account for news stories that deviate from elite focus and individualistic framing, which have been regularly critiqued in scholarship on dominant news values. T...

Journalists regularly use trending hashtags for story ideas and to promote their own initiatives on social media. To what extent do these practices constitute solidarity in journalism? This chapter provides a framework for assessing the quality of journalism using a solidarity lens. Growing concerns about digital silos, selective exposure, and pola...

American journalists regularly humanize marginalized communities in an attempt to bridge social distance. Journalists’ techniques for doing so may constrain representations to the level of individual turmoil and resilience without accounting for structural factors, however, which has troubling social justice implications. This study examines how jo...

New perspectives on the misinformation ecosystem that is the production and circulation of fake news. What is fake news? Is it an item on Breitbart, an article in The Onion, an outright falsehood disseminated via Russian bot, or a catchphrase used by a politician to discredit a story he doesn't like? This book examines the real fake news: the const...

This paper examines the normative role of constructive journalism—also called “solutions journalism”—by analyzing metajournalistic discourse about solutions-focused journalism. The findings show that constructive and solutions journalism are defined similarly: they profess traditional Anglo-Saxon journalistic norms and practices, even as they shift...

Journalism that humanizes marginalized communities can advance social justice by appealing to collective solidarity. News reporting, however, often encourages audience empathy instead of solidarity by representing social injustice as individual problems. This paper examines mechanisms of empathy and solidarity in two news outlets that participated...