Last summer, solidarity became a national buzzword. Thousands of people declared and demanded solidarity against racism in the wake of police murdering George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Some news organizations swiftly moved beyond the statement by implementing and amplifying solidarity reporting: the practice of going directly to marginalized communities to inform accurate coverage instead of solely relying on authorities and elites to tell the story. But many news outlets did not go this route, and remain caught between a desire to appear neutrally “balanced” and the growing understanding that mistaking balance for accuracy can promote misinformation with grave repercussions.

As journalism funders regularly pledge to support accurate reporting, it’s time to be more specific — and more discerning — about what qualifies as accurate reporting, particularly in coverage of marginalized people.

News organizations often achieve surface-level accuracy by amplifying the words they hear on a police scanner or during a press conference without mistyping or omitting any talking points. The problem is that accurately repeating what someone says doesn’t mean their statements are true: distortions, decontextualized self-validation, and outright lies are common. And as we know from research in the last five years alone, fact-checking after publishing doesn’t easily fix misinformation.

Substantive accuracy, on the other hand, is a hallmark of solidarity reporting and means more than centering institutions of power and people employed by them. It means amplifying the voices of those who live the news every day.

Members of marginalized communities don’t need to imagine this scenario. They live it every day when even the best-resourced local news outlets persistently quote credentialed experts, law enforcement, and bureaucrats at the expense of representing the people who are living, struggling, and dying due to the unjust conditions under discussion.

Read the full article about solidarity reporting by Anita Varma at Medium.