Moral solidarity as a news value: Rendering marginalized communities and enduring social injustice newsworthy

Abstract

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. This article contributes a grounded framework for locating and analyzing types of solidarity that operate as news values in reporting on marginalized communities. Through qualitative textual analysis of articles published as part of the 2016 San Francisco Homeless Project, this study finds that news values of intragroup solidarity, civic solidarity, political solidarity, and moral solidarity unevenly arise in coverage of local homelessness, and each have implications for whose perspectives are rendered newsworthy. The majority of stories that exhibit solidarity as a news value are aligned with either civic solidarity or political solidarity, which means they maintain focus on the city and critique the structure of the housing market but do not necessarily move journalists toward more inclusive sourcing of people experiencing homelessness. In contrast, intragroup solidarity stories offer a grounded narrative of “we take care of us,” and moral solidarity stories amplify a narrative of “let us live – here’s what we need from you.” These stories represent the perspectives of people subjected to enduring social injustice. Moral solidarity offers the strongest value for journalism that represents marginalized communities because it renders people whose dignity is denigrated by current systemic arrangements newsworthy and amplifies their urgent appeals for concrete changes.