Press Terminology and Disablism

A news report on a students with disabilities panel at Ohio State gives small samples from two students who use wheelchairs, a deaf student, a student who has Asperger's, a blind student, and a student who has dyslexia. It was a bit hard to tell if the story was annoying and disablist (e.g., "confined to a wheelchair," "in spite of daily obstacles") or empowering and educational (e.g., "I wouldn't be who I am today if I wasn't dyslexic. I would be a totally different person and I don't want to be a different person. I like who I am").

Given that the disablist bits don't come from the student quotes but from the rest of the text, perhaps this is more an artifact of the person who wrote the story than the actual panel having been in the category of "self-narrating zoo exhibit" or "super crip" or worse.

The disability panel article is no where near as bad as some of the horrific verbiage describing people with mental illness discussed in a recent UPI article, but it's really the same problem.

Popular media--the press, television, movies, all of it--needs a better education on how to respectfully talk with and about people with disabilities. Perhaps exactly as suggested in this excellent piece on avoiding disability stereotypes in journalism from the Indiana School of Journalism.

(Side note: Cody Boisclair wrote to the Guardian (see comments), requesting that they comply with their own disability policy and remove the word "suffering" from their recent autism and girls headline. Guardian changed the headline right away--Kudos to both Cody and the Guardian!)