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WILL MEDIA MISREPRESENTATION OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES AFFECT NEWS COVERAGE AND HIRING GOALS?
by Betsy Bayha ¹

With rare exception, the media use the same shop-worn stereotypes to portray people with disabilities: the pitiable cripple, the courageous and inspiring hero, the broken spirit who would be better off dead - unless, of course, there's a cure just around the corner.

What is it about disability that makes the media so uneasy? Why do the media continually use the same ill-fitting and inaccurate phrases? Mainstream media coverage of Christopher Reeve's disability emphasized his chances of walking again, rather than living with and accepting his condition, as dealt with in the disability magazine New Mobility. So terms such as "wheelchair-bound," "afflicted," and "special needs" - are these not terms the disability community rejected long ago?

"Disability is still such a negative stereotype," asserts Bill Stothers, editor and publisher of the disability magazine and a thirty-year veteran of newsrooms in Canada and the United States. Stothers, who uses a wheelchair, says deeply entrenched fear of disability has both created inhospitable newsrooms and perpetuated negative coverage of disability issues by the media. "I've seen little positive change over the years," he says.

Given the mainstream media's poor to nonexistent coverage of people with disabilities, one would hardly guess they make up the largest single minority group in the United States - about 54 million people, according to U.S. Census figures.

So when the American Society of Newspaper Editors voted in October to expand its mission statement on newsroom diversity to include people with disabilities along with women, lesbians and gay men, older people, and people of color, it seemed to be a positive step. But the move has raised concerns and criticism - both among some people of color who see the expansion of diversity as further erosion of affirmative action efforts designed to increase opportunities for ethnic minorities, and among disability groups who are skeptical about their inclusion.

"I don't see a genuine commitment to truly covering disability," says Leye Chrzanowski, president and executive editor of Disability News Service in Virginia. For one thing, Chrzanowski says, the ASNE diversity statement seems to only cover people with physical disabilities. It reads, in part: "The newsroom must be a place in which all employees contribute their full potential, regardless of ... physical ability or other defining characteristic."

Chrzanowski says the ASNE statement ignores people with mental or sensory disabilities. He points out that the media often think of people with disabilities as "people in wheelchairs and people who are mentally retarded - that's it." Yet some of the media's brightest stars, including CBS' Mike Wallace, have experienced clinical depression, one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized disabilities in our society today.

Veronica Jennings, diversity director at ASNE, says that the organization's mission statement does include people with all types of disabilities in the phrase "other defining characteristic."

But even though the ASNE board expanded its mission statement and approved adding women to its annual census on newsroom employment, the board stated that the focus of its diversity initiatives would remain on the hiring and promotion of people of color in the newsroom.

ASNE adopted a well-known goal in 1978, which challenged the industry to achieve racial parity by 2000 or sooner. According to ASNE's annual newsroom census, conducted at the beginning of 1998, minority journalists comprise 11.46 percent of the professional newsroom work force. People of color currently account for 26 percent of the total US population.

In April, the ASNE board issued a new draft diversity statement for comment from its members, journalism organizations, media foundations, and other interested parties. The society received considerable written comment on the draft statement, and the ASNE Diversity Committee held a meeting in August to discuss the comments and make recommendations to the board.

Each year, ASNE sponsors job recruitment programs, publications, and an annual census of ethnic and racial minorities employed in newsrooms across the country. ASNE also focuses on job recruitment, retention, and promotion efforts. Gilbert Bailón, vice president and executive editor at the Dallas Morning News and chair of ASNE's diversity committee, says it is possible that ASNE's diversity programs may expand in the future.

"Newspaper editors could make a big difference," says Stothers, adding that if any meaningful change is to come from an expanded diversity effort, "the same programs set up for other groups should also be available for people with disabilities."

Christopher Reeve: A Case Study

Coverage of Christopher Reeve's transformation from "Cryptonite to Crip," as Los Angeles based public relations consultant Tarl Susan Hartman irreverently describes it, provides abundant examples of how the media still get disability coverage all wrong.

Hartman, who works with a variety of disability groups, says media coverage of Reeve has tended to emphasize negative stereotypes about disability. A look at coverage of Reeve's story over the past few years provides plenty of examples. In 1996, shortly after the horse-riding accident in which Reeve became a quadriplegic, Time magazine headlined its cover story on him, "Super Man," and then proceeded to hit the most pervasive stereotype about people with disabilities in a five-sentence blurb in the table of contents: "Will he ever walk again?" The magazine editors noted that shortly after the accident, Reeve considered suicide but bounced back and was now engaged in a "heroic battle to rebuild his life and help find a cure for spinal cord injuries." From a civil rights perspective, disability must be transformed from being a personal tragedy to being an expected part of the life cycle.

The coverage of Reeve's condition made many members of the disability community wince. Why? Because stories about heroic disabled people striving to overcome their tragic fate have been rehashed ad nauseum. The problem with this story angle is that it obscures the civil rights message the disability community has articulated for the past thirty years: Disability should be viewed in a wider context than merely the personal struggle of individuals. From a civil rights perspective, disability must be transformed from being a personal tragedy to being an expected part of the life cycle. The responsibility of accommodating this diversity falls to the greater society and is no longer just a burden each person with a disability has to bear on his or her own.

The media have also done an incomplete job of medical and science reporting on the question of whether Reeve will be able to walk again. Television anchor Dan Rather, on CBS News' "48 Hours," broadcast Sept. 3, 1998, provided an example of this. After a profile of Reeve in which the actor asserted "we're going to get out of these [wheel] chairs," Rather introduced a follow-up story by saying Reeve "could walk again" according to a new spinal cord regeneration research being conducted on laboratory rats. Both Reeve and the media who report his assertions unchallenged are guilty of raising false expectations about finding a "cure" for spinal cord injury.

"The media still believe in Superman," says Hartman. "They're perpetuating the myth." Significantly, when conducting interviews with the disability press, Reeve modulates his assertions that he will walk again. Instead, Reeve talks of "incremental recovery" and recapturing some movement, but he doesn't talk about throwing away his wheelchair.

What the media - and Reeve - have failed to understand is that it is not uncommon for people with disabilities to hope for a cure at the onset of their disability. It is a phase some people must pass through on the road to self-acceptance. But living with a disability and challenging societal attitudes and barriers does not grab headlines the same way a cure for spinal cord injuries does.

"If and when Reeve starts to change his message and stops talking about walking again," Harman muses, "will the media even be interested?"

Disability and Assisted Suicide

The most dangerous stereotype in the Reeve coverage has been the attention focused on his fleeting thoughts of suicide shortly after his accident. Barbara Walters asked about it, Time wrote about it, and the mainstream media frequently repeat this aspect of Reeve's story. Mentioning suicide hits a raw nerve for many in the disability community who have faced the ignominy of hearing others describe disability as "a fate worse than death."

Talk of suicide also touches on one of the hottest stories within the disability community, one that the mainstream media have all but ignored: the debate over assisted suicide.

"Assisted suicide has not been reported from the disability perspective," says Hartman, who points out that most of the well-reported cases of suicide assisted by Dr. Jack Kevorkian's were of patients who had some kind of disability, which was not mentioned in many of the stories.

Other disability stories that the mainstream media repeatedly miss include issues of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, the backlash against efforts to "mainstream" children with disabilities in schools, and the impact of HMO-based health care on people with disabilities.

And like with stories in the mainstream media about gays and lesbians, there is also a need to present ethnic and racial diversity within the disability community as well.

"The onus is on the disability community to communicate with the media," adds Hartman.

Speculating on why that has not happened, Hartman points to the protracted political battles to defend the Americans with Disabilities Act and reauthorize the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which have focused the attention of disability community on Congress rather than improving coverage in the media.

For his part, Bailón acknowledges that lobbying is likely to have a positive impact and that ASNE has not, as yet, received much pressure from disability groups. "We could focus on issues of [disability] coverage more aggressively," he concedes, as long as ASNE gets a strong message from the community that it has to be done.

Betsy Bayha is director of technology policy at the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, CA. She was a radio news journalist at National Public Radio affiliate KQED-FM in San Francisco covering health policy and the environment.

• Avoid the common stereotypes of disabled people as either helpless or pitiable or as unusually courageous. Both approaches are patronizing. In this era of technological aids, greater access to housing, education, and public services, a disabled person's accomplishments should not be considered unusually amazing or requiring inordinate courage. By the same token, it is inappropriate to assume that people with disabilities are incapable of helping themselves. Don't underplay their abilities or overplay their accomplishments.
• Use "people first" language, instead of disability terms, to describe people. People with disabilities are often described by the type of disability they have. This diminishes them as people and presents them as a diagnosis. Avoid descriptions such as "the deaf," "the blind," or "the disabled." Instead describe the person, and if relevant, their disability.
• Be careful in your choice of descriptive words. Avoid the phrases, "wheelchair bound," "special needs," and "afflicted." The disability community generally rejects these phrases in favor of more appropriate choices such as "wheelchair user," "reasonable accommodation," and "person with disability."

1. Betsy Bayha is director of technology policy at the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, CA. She was a radio news journalist at National Public Radio affiliate KQED-FM in San Francisco covering health policy and the environment. She contributed this article for the ASNE Reader from which it was culled.