When Empathy is Not Enough

The possibilities for solidarity in The San Francisco Homeless Project

Bibliographic Data

ID12909237
AuthorsAnita Varma (0000-0001-5951-6536, Stanford University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume13
Issue1
Pages105-121
Publication date2017-11-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournalism Practice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1751-2786 • E-ISSN: 1751-2794
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17512786.2017.1394210
OpenAlexW2768622632
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited35

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 in The San Francisco Homeless Project. The San Francisco Homeless Project was a collaborative journalistic effort in June 2016 that called for attention and action to address homelessness. The San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage represents homeless people as beset with individual problems, which encourages empathy, and its accompanying solutions journalism suggests expanded individual services to address these problems. On the other hand, AlterNet emphasizes shared conditions that homeless people endure, which situates homelessness as a social injustice and invites solidarity against systemic factors that produce and maintain homelessness. This distinction is important because strictly evoking empathy for individuals places journalism on a trajectory to suggest individualistic remedies to an issue like homelessness, whereas inviting solidarity charts a course for large-scale social change

Criminology · Empathy · Individualism · Injustice · Journalism · Media studies · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Solidarity · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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