Media Coverage of Disability Issues

Persons with disabilities receive treatment in the news. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters report found an “overall lack of coverage of disability issues by television news outlets,” and what coverage there is typically tends to fall into the “victim” or “supercrip” categories: either stories that ask for the viewer’s sympathy or “uplifting” stories of people who have “overcome” their disabilities. It’s significant that the most TV coverage given to persons with disabilities is the Paralympic Games, which – despite the International Paralympic Committee’s efforts to “emphasize… the participants' athletic achievements rather than their disability” – are almost invariably presented in news coverage as triumph-over-adversity stories.

Lack of participation

Joanne Smith, host of CBC’s Moving On, said after researching a story on persons with disabilities in the media that “I was actually shocked when I spoke to some casting agents and some executive producers specifically about hiring people with disabilities, whether it be for broadcasting or for acting, and I had some people point-blank tell me they didn’t want to hire people with disabilities.”

The Canadian Association of Broadcasters report found that “there is a lack of participation, particularly with respect to employment, among persons with disabilities in television programming. This was found to be due in large part to a lack of communication and information accessible to persons with disabilities about employment opportunities in the broadcasting industry as a whole.”