A word of caution

Before we go on, I wanted to bring up a caveat about the previous sections. When I talk about avoiding “inspirational” tropes or so-called “overcoming” narratives in our stories, one question looms large. What happens if the sources themselves rely on these narratives? It’s more common than you might think. Even I, noted inspiration-porn hater, have been known to use tired metaphors and rely on harmful tropes, both in my written work and when being interviewed by other journalists. This can happen for many reasons, a few of which I’ll elaborate on below.

It’s a reflex

Sometimes I’ll be typing along, really in the zone, knowing that I’m going to make my deadline, when suddenly I gaze in horror at my own copy and see that lead, you know the one, from the Introduction:

• [Source X] has [disability], but she doesn’t let that stop her from [going to the grocery store/swimming with dolphins/being a Paralympic medallist/working as an accountant]. 

Several things immediately go through my mind: Am I on drugs? Am I not on the drugs I have been prescribed? Do I need to drink water or eat food? Have I been taken over by some alien creature or ableist spirit forcing me to write this drivel?

But usually the answer boils down to one or more of these: I’m tired, I’m in a hurry, I’m lazy, or I didn’t think deeply enough.

 
Ableist disability narratives are so embedded in the public consciousness that it’s not surprising journalists’ brains reach for them when telling disability stories. They’re the only kind of disability stories most of us know, and even if you’ve spent a long time trying to push back against them, they’re still everywhere in popular culture and in our collective mechanisms for meaning-making. Resisting them takes conscious effort.

 
And the reason they’re so ubiquitous boils down to … well, us. The media. These are the kinds of stories we’ve published, so they’re the kind that makes sense to our audiences, which includes our sources. Our sources learn that using these narratives is a good way to get access to sympathetic media coverage, and they use them in a strategic manner (consciously or unconsciously.) Our audiences respond positively to the narratives. This leads to more stories like this getting published and “doing numbers,” so the cycle repeats itself over generations.

I want to reiterate here another point from the introduction: I’m not trying to get people to stop relying on these narratives because they’re offensive (although they are), lazy (although they are), or stereotypical (although they are). I do believe they are harmful, but not primarily in the sense that they hurt people’s feelings or make them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Indeed, my primary objection to them isn’t about feelings at all. Instead, I believe these narratives are harmful because they are not true. Continuing to publish them is, therefore, a betrayal of the first and greatest value of our profession, which is to tell the truth.

“But Rick Hansen, Christopher Reeve, Terry Fox and Stephen Hawking overcame their disabilities.” 

First of all, why are people’s inspiring disability heroes almost always white men who were not born disabled?

Second … no, they didn’t (see Framing, Disabled people who “overcome disability; see People of interest). They pretty famously did nothing of the sort. That was the entire point and why you thought they were interesting to begin with. If those men had overcome their disabilities, you would have known about them for entirely different reasons, such as the spontaneous regeneration of a limb or healing of a broken spinal cord. (Hawking may be a partial exception, in that he lived many years beyond the standard life expectancy for someone with ALS, a progressive and ultimately fatal neuromuscular disorder[1]. He and other experts interviewed have attributed his outcome to having a less virulent form of the disease, which is rare but more common in those diagnosed at a younger age, as Hawking was. They also credit the excellent 24-hour nursing care he received for decades and his strong family support, along with physiotherapy and excellent nutrition, which, for various reasons, is not usually available to other disabled people[2]. Interestingly, while some also credit Hawking’s “strong will” and “positive attitude” for his longevity, those sources equate this positive attitude with Hawking’s acceptance of his disability rather than his belief in a potential cure for himself.) To me, Hawking’s story is more of a disability-acceptance narrative than one of overcoming.

 
If your response to this point is something along the lines of “but they overcame so much to get where they are in spite of their disabilities,” thank you for making my point for me. As Bess Williamson and others have stated, media framing of disability generally requires disabled people to “overcome” rhetorically, if not in fact, in order to be granted personhood[3]. Those who stubbornly insist on telling the truth — that they are and remain disabled, that they continue to do things and live lives while disabled, and that they think that conditions for disabled people ought to improve (that is, they make claims to full personhood and the full participation in society that comes with full personhood) — are generally given what Williamson calls the “bitter cripple” label (see Language: Trope to avoid 3). Their “anger” is blamed on their “bad attitude,” “noncompliance,” or “entitlement.” They are “ungrateful.”

 
(Often, disabled people get this label from the “helping” or “allied” professions even more than from the public at large. The public at large, however, is often eager to leap to the defence of these professionals, with pleas for compassion and understanding for the people who are not providing access, on the grounds that these people are “doing the best they can,” and disabled people are being “unreasonable.” Somehow, disabled people are never “doing the best we can” except when we’re being inspirational.)

In her book Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve and The Case Against Disability Rights, disabled journalist Mary Johnson discusses how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a civil rights law passed in 1990 to ensure access to society for people with disabilities, was discredited in the mainstream press[4]. This, Johnson argues, happened because the public was not prepared to accept that disabled people were able to make claims based on having civil rights that could be violated.

Opponents of the ADA and its provisions argued that women, Black people, and those we would now refer to as LGBTQ+ faced discrimination based on hate, but disabled people faced no such animus. Everyone wants to help them, the reasoning went.

 
And the American public generally believed there was already a solution to the problems disabled people faced: special assistance. Johnson writes:

• The time honored way of the disabled has been to give them something special, that is to say segregated. “Special” has been our country’s sanctioned way of dealing with disabled people, and a large part of the complaints of those against disability rights is that disability-rights advocates are not content with special, no longer willing to accept it, even when it is best for them.

Disabled people, Johnson says, are viewed as unreasonable when we demand access to the same things everyone else has, at the same time, to the same extent and in the same way. Rather than covering these demands appropriately and objectively, or even with sympathy, mainstream media is often among the biggest cheerleaders for the argument against disability rights. Johnson quotes many editorials from the New York Times, specifically — its editorial board argued against the enforcement of the ADA at many points over the years, regardless of the disability being discussed or how “reasonable” the accommodations might have been. According to the Times, it was unreasonable for disabled people to expect access to, for example, subway stations, buses, public washrooms, paratransit services (when they were refused access to conventional transit), public housing, mobility aids (such as white canes) airplane flights and education[5].

 
While Johnson’s book was written in 2003 about a law passed in 1990, the same arguments are used and the same inaction justified today. (Literally today: in 2005, the province passed the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act or AODA, which was modelled after the American ADA in many respects, and under which Ontario was supposed to be accessible by January 2025. This did not happen.)

As Johnson says, society and the media divide the disabled into groups: the deserving disabled — those who truly “can’t work” because their “bodies are all messed up“ and “don’t work right” — and the people who are often framed like this: “They might have something wrong with them but aren’t really disabled” and they are ruining it for the first category by claiming “entitlements” that are for the truly disabled. Johnson cites a segment from a 1995 CBS news program 60 Minutes in which journalist Andy Rooney tries to find out who really needs disabled parking spots and whether people have placards to which they should not be entitled.

So how did 60 Minutes, a venerable journalistic institution, handle disability reporting? They took their van to a mall parking lot and watched people get in and out of their cars, looking at who was using the disability parking spots. Although many people who pulled into these parking spots had placards, Rooney and his crew “just couldn’t tell” how those parking spot users were disabled or whether they really were entitled to use parking placards — because they could walk.

Although Rooney does admit that one person could have had a heart condition (“You just couldn’t tell”), he nevertheless seems to think that his crew should just be able to tell by sight, and if they could not, someone must be lying to them. As a reporter myself, I wondered whether some other reporting techniques could possibly have been used. Could 60 Minutes reporters have approached any of the people using the parking spots and asked them why they were using the parking spots, perhaps? Could they have asked the organization responsible for issuing the placards how many instances of fraud they might have seen?
And this is where “overcoming” narratives become harmful. As Williamson notes, these narratives actually create the conditions in which someone has to “overcome disability” by imposing the frame from outside, in order to be granted legitimacy in public discourse. This is why we media practitioners use that frame all the time, even when it plainly isn’t true.

The framework serves as a way for journalists to make the story legible to our audience. But its actual effect is to render disabled people even more marked, more “other,” than before, and to impose an honorary non-disabled status on some disabled people that may be unwanted or dishonest.

If you notice an overcoming narrative in your copy, first, ask yourself whether it is true, on the most basic level. (For example, did I overcome my disability to attend journalism school? No, I was able to attend because Carleton University has better disability accommodations than other journalism schools.) If it’s not, get rid of it, just as you would any other falsehood. (This will get rid of most of them.) After that, ask yourself whether it’s actually relevant to the story you’re telling. (If you’re writing a story about disability law or policy, do you really need an overcoming narrative?) Then, ask your editor to go through the same exercise.

If, after this, you still have an overcoming narrative in your copy, ask yourself why. What does it show? What would be lost if you framed the story differently? What makes an overcoming narrative true and necessary here? If, when you’re really honest with yourself, it’s “because readers like that sort of thing” or “because it makes me feel good,” reconsider.

Disabled people know what the media want to hear and what gets journalists’ attention

Disabled people are not stupid. We also read newspapers and watch television broadcasts. We listen to podcasts, turn the radio on during our commutes, and read a lot of digital media. We know what gets media attention and audience response. Usually, that’s an overcoming narrative. So, when we want to appear in the media, we will often reach for these narratives, not only because we know they will help get our message out to people, but also because we know that non-disabled people are more comfortable with this kind of messaging.

 
Rather than go too much into specific examples of this phenomenon, I invite you watch the TVO-produced documentary The Perfect Story[6]. It works best if you know absolutely nothing about it going in, so rather than give you a plot summary, I’m just going to tell you should watch it and then offer some discussion questions.

For those of you who need more persuasion to watch this, I’ll give you the general outline (although I won’t give away the exact nature of the twist). The Perfect Story follows Canadian journalist Michelle Shephard as she meets a young Somalian refugee named Ismael Abdulle, who has been grievously injured in a manner that resulted in significant disability. Shephard and Abdulle remain in touch over the years, and her coverage of Abdulle’s story is part of what allows him to start a new life in Norway as a refugee. The documentary is supposed to cover Abdulle’s first trip home in years, but all is not as it seems, and over the course of the shoot, it becomes clear that Abdulle has lied about the way he first became disabled, and he can’t cope with keeping up the charade anymore.

It’s important to know that everything else about Abdulle’s story is true. His disability is real. He acquired it in exactly the same violent manner that he said he had. He was a child when this happened. He was in desperate need of help, rehabilitation for his injuries and a safe place to grow to adulthood. Getting these things involved leaving his family and his home and moving across the world by himself. The only thing that was not true was the reason he’d been subjected to this violence in the first place.

After you’ve watched the documentary, ask yourself:

•  Why would Abdulle have lied?
• Does knowing why he was hurt make you more or less sympathetic to him?
• What do you think of the reasons for his lies?
• If you had been in Shephard’s place and a child such as Abdulle had told you that he’d been injured for the real reason he’d injured, would you have gone to similar lengths to help him?
• Would your readership have responded as positively?
• Do you think Abdulle’s lie made a difference in terms of how he was treated by the Canadian journalists who helped him and by refugee programs in Norway?
• Do you think better or worse of him for having lied?
• Do you see his tactics as manipulative, as a shrewd survival strategy, as the desperate gambit of a child who knows that he will die if he does not leave? Or perhaps all of the above?
• What do you think it says about journalism as a profession that Abdulle felt he had to tell this lie?
• Do you think he was right?
• How does it make you think of yourself as a journalist?

It’s how we think, or are taught to think, of ourselves

Most disabled people have grown up around non-disabled people and have been fed a steady diet of inspiration porn from a young age. Our family members are products of this society, and as they want us to have a good life, they will feed this diet to us in a well-meaning way. A common thread among professionals who advise parents is that disabled children are lazy and do not wish to exercise agency, so they need to be pushed to achieve rehabilitation goals. Being told that we disabled people can do anything we put our mind to — while that’s demonstrably untrue — seems to serve as a way to reinforce this pushing. Disabled people are encouraged to simply play the “hand they are dealt,” which means not asking for changes around them but rather work harder, “overcome” and inspire those around them.
As journalists, it’s not our role to speak over our sources or to suggest that their beliefs about themselves are wrong or somehow less evolved than those of others. It is certainly not our role to serve as psychiatrists or helping professionals. However, it is our role to challenge our sources, seek accountability, and speak truth to power.

If you are interviewing a disabled source and you hear what sound like stock phrases or things you suspect the source may think you want to hear, it is absolutely okay to ask some probing follow-up questions, just as you would with any other source you suspect is giving you a line. Certainly do not accuse a source of lying if their beliefs seem to you to be sincerely held, but it is all right to probe them a little bit by asking questions such as, “When you say you want to inspire other people, what does that mean to you?” or “When you say you are not like other disabled people but are just like everybody else, what does that mean to you? What would it mean to be like other disabled people?” Or “What is it exactly that you want to overcome?” Try to get a deeper, clearer look at what they think. Sometimes this will require multiple conversations and building a relationship of trust. Show your sources that you’re looking for more than just a sound bite, and they’ll be more likely to give to you that deeper look.

 
Don’t go with the first thing people say. Allow them time to get comfortable with you and with the process. My instructors at Carleton taught me that some of the best responses I can get often come as the interview is wrapping up, when I ask if there’s anything else the source wants to add. I’ve found this holds true in stories about all kinds of topics. The best quotes often come in the form of a negative response to that question, such as, “No, we’ve covered everything, and there’s nothing else, but just remember this one thing….”