When Empathy is Not Enough

Abstract

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.

KEYWORDS:

• American journalism
• empathy
• homeless representation
• humanizing techniques
• social justice
• solidarity

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges Professor Theodore L. Glasser (Stanford University), Professor James T. Hamilton (Stanford University), Tanja Aitamurto (Stanford University), and Andreas Katsanevas (Stanford University) for their feedback when developing this work.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Aligned with Benedict Anderson (1983, 6), this paper defines communities as comprised of people who often do not know each other personally and may never meet, but are nevertheless bonded on the basis of lived conditions shared in common. Communities, Iris Marion Young (2011, 43) argues, are formed “in the encounter and interaction between social collectivities that experience some differences in their way of life and forms of association, even if they also regard themselves as belonging to the same society”—such as encounters between housed and homeless people who also identify as San Franciscans.

2 Dignity, Immanuel Kant (1997, 42) has argued, means treating people respectfully and humanely, rather than as mechanized sources for products or services in the market, or as pawns for achieving strategic, self-serving aims. Dignity resides both at the level of the individual as well as the level of the community (Young 2011, 44). Schachter (1983, 852) offers a list of affronts to dignity, including: being stereotyped as inferior on the basis of group membership, a lack of privacy, not having basic needs for food and shelter met, discrimination, unequal political participation, and degrading living conditions. Lists of affronts to dignity are always incomplete, but are useful because “different aspects of the meaning of human dignity emerge from the plethora of experiences of what it means to be humiliated and deeply hurt” (Habermas 2010, 467–468).

3 Each Chronicle portrait appeared digitally on a separate slideshow page with a single paragraph, which is why the portraits are referenced by the names of people in the portrait instead of paragraph numbers.

4 Similarly, the subsection “Being a homeless woman is terrifying” specifies the experience of homeless women and invites empathy with homeless individuals in the subsection—while also appealing to solidarity with homeless people. This section represents practices among women who live on the streets in an effort to survive, such as: “Women often team up with men they are not interested in for protection from predators, housed or not, who prey on them. A 65-year-old homeless woman rides the bus at night to stay safe” (Nieves 2016, para. 15). AlterNet includes the individual experience of the 65-year-old woman riding the bus at night, but this is not the sole focus of the article: instead, the larger point is that women seek refuge in buses. The representation of homeless women’s shared experience positions safety as a public safety issue beyond personal phobias. Here, AlterNet accounts for the particular experience of homeless women while also construing them as part of a larger community.