Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media by Beth A. Haller

Author:Beth A. Haller
Language: eng
Format: epub

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6. Disability media tell their own stories

Disability media, like other types of alternative or dissident media in U.S. society, advocate on behalf of a distinctive U.S. group that has come together to form a political and social community. Over the years, these publications have vigorously covered the issues that affect the disability community. They’re considered “alternative” or “dissident” media also because of the historic discrimination and exclusion people with disabilities have faced in society, as well as the negative stereotyping they have received from the mainstream news media.

Many people with disabilities have been isolated throughout U.S. history because of the architectural, occupational, communication, and educational barriers in society, but they have still played an integral part in the social and political development of the U.S. Their publications illustrate this. However, the publications of this community have never received much attention in mass media studies, even though many disability publications have a long history in the U.S.; some have been ongoing since 1907. Few scholars have analyzed disability media in any systematic way or at all.

This chapter fills that void by illustrating the vibrant diversity of disability media. It is based on a content analysis of a sample of the disability magazines, newspapers, and newsletters being produced in the 1990s (N-134),1 evaluating demographic characteristics of the publications, as well as looking as content issues. This chapter discusses the ways in which many disability publications fall into media historian Lauren Kessler’s alternative press model of dissident media.2

The alternative press model

Kessler theorizes that minority groups or alternative groups in society have historically had three typical forms of presentation by the mainstream press, all negative: 1) they are excluded completely from coverage by the mainstream press; 2) only their events/demonstrations are covered by the press, not their ideas or issues; 3) they are covered within the context of negative stereotypes and are held up to ridicule and insult.3 This kind of coverage caused them to develop their own media.

In ethnic press history, the first African-American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, developed in the mid-1800s because the black community was not allowed to respond to anti-black editorials that were being run in the mainstream newspaper. The Ram’s Horn, an early African-American newspaper, developed because Willis Hodges, a black man, tried to get his letter to the editor published in the New York Sun; he was made to pay $15 and the letter ran as an advertisement. He was told, “The Sun shines for all white men, not for colored men.” Hodges was thus inspired to begin his own newspaper, Ram’s Horn. 4

A comparable modern example from the disability community occurred in 1998 when nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist William Raspberry complained that a blind man asking for the Bay Area transit system’s Web site for bus and train schedules to be accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was “a clear violation of common sense.” Raspberry, who is African American and considers himself a “civil rights liberal,” says he is angry with people with disabilities who insist “their disability be accommodated to and that we take no notice of it.

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