Covering contentious topics, such as protests or social justice issues, can be challenging for news outlets. In the face of this, it’s important to seek out journalistic practices that are seen as credible by people across the political spectrum.
Utilizing solidarity reporting – where journalists prioritize the firsthand knowledge, insights, and perspectives of people subjected to social injustice – to cover these social justice topics is found to be more credible, complete, and trustworthy than another type of watchdog journalism known as monitorial reporting.
Now, a new study examines whether covering an abortion protest using a solidarity approach increases perceptions of news story credibility compared to a monitorial approach.
Solidarity Reporting vs Monitorial Reporting
Before exploring the findings, it’s crucial to understand the differences between the two types of reporting. Both seek to hold officials accountable – and often focus on the same topics – but take different approaches.
Monitorial reporting aims to keep officials publicly accountable by amplifying their actions and comments. Studies have shown that this type of reporting often falls short of watchdog journalism, however, and instead reinforces existing power structures. This type of coverage tends to adopt official definitions and doesn’t include insights from people experiencing social injustice directly.
Solidarity reporting seeks to hold officials accountable by representing the lived experiences of communities whose basic dignity is at stake – particularly when officials do not acknowledge these experiences. Solidarity reporting means that journalists prioritize the definitions, insights, perspectives, and needs of people impacted by and fighting to address social injustice that officials have not resolved or addressed.
Study Findings
Story Credibility
We conducted a survey experiment with 1,342 participants (half Republicans, half Democrats) who were randomly assigned to read an abortion protest story written in a solidarity style, an abortion protest story written in a monitorial style, or a story about economic inflation. Findings showed that the solidarity-style story led to significantly higher perceptions of credibility among Democrats, compared to the monitorial-style story. Republican readers’ news credibility perceptions were unchanged regardless of which reporting approach was used. Proponents of solidarity reporting may consider this promising because it shows that solidarity reporting will not further diminish Republicans’ already low news credibility.1
Additional Findings
The study also found that both the monitorial and solidarity stories produced no significant differences regarding participants’ knowledge about abortion or positive attitude toward the abortion protest movement. This contradicts some critiques of solidarity reporting that assume it “indoctrinates” people with positive views of social justice efforts.
The use of a transparency box – an explainer box that informed people about the journalistic approach to the article – was also tested to see if it would affect people’s perceptions of solidarity reporting. Though the boxes have been shown to increase credibility in some cases, use of the box in this study did not affect people’s perceptions of the credibility of the story, knowledge about abortion, or their attitudes toward abortion.
Full citation: Varma, A., Masullo, G., Limov, B., Graham, E., Kim, M. S., & Malik, K. K. “My body, my choice” versus “officials say” Examining the effects of solidarity and monitorial reporting. News Research Journal, 30497841251317293.
- Collier, J. R., Masullo, G. M., & Duchovnay, M. (2022). Conservative news audiences: A lack of media trust and how they think journalism can improve. In R. E. Gutsche Jr., (Ed.), The future of the presidency, journalism and democracy: After Trump (pp. 50–66). Routledge.[↩]