Disability Representation in Journalism

Noticing a couple of disability-focused articles in the New York Times recently, I began to wonder about the frequency and expansiveness of journalism related to disability experience and justice. Similarly to the lack of disabled representation in fictional contexts, I feel that I don’t often encounter disability representation and coverage in a journalistic context, at least not naturally, without looking for it. I also don’t usually go to journalistic sources to get stories from disabled perspectives. Most of the knowledge about disability-related issues and justice efforts I have gained outside of class readings has been from very intentional research and often organization/personal websites themselves, not from news sources. After briefly looking into this disparity, I found that the New York Times created a reporting fellow position focused on disability-related issues in 2021, in partnership with the National Center on Disability and Journalism at Arizona State University. In the announcement, the Times’ director of early career journalism strategy acknowledged the clear problem: “Few avenues exist to develop journalistic expertise on disability issues because such beats do not exist at most news outlets.” Though the fellowship partnership is still going on, and the current fellow writes quite a few disability-focused articles per year and seems open to reader feedback, directly asking what readers want to see about disability, there is only one such disability-dedicated position out of the around 2300 journalists for the Times, which does not seem at all representative. The Times also seemingly has a “disabilities” section, with a few articles a month, but interestingly, it is listed under the “Health” section, perpetuating the medical model of disability, and sidelining the importance of disability as an identity and creator of community. I also wonder how represented disabled perspectives and journalists are on the whole in this section, with a suspicion that there could be so much improvement given how few resources seem to be dedicated to covering disability topics and experiences. Though this is just a small snapshot into one publication, it and other conversations of visibility we have had emphasize that there is so much to be done to improve disabled representation in media overall. As I move beyond this class, I hope to continue to be conscious of this disparity and actively seek out disabled voices in media and journalism.