Evaluating the credibility of disabled sources

It’s natural for human beings to attempt to build relationships of trust. This holds true for the relationship between a journalist and the source they are interviewing, a service provider and a service recipient, or people in any other form of relationship. But no matter how much we journalists may try to be objective, we’re human beings first, and in general, we’re more likely to trust a friend over a stranger, a close family member over a friend, and someone who seems to know what they’re talking about over someone who seems to be talking nonsense or saying things that we don’t understand.

As journalists, we have a vested interest in finding out whether the people we speak with are telling the truth, and field work requires us to make quick judgment calls about our sources’ honesty, credibility and reliability. When working with disabled sources, this can become even more complicated, because many of the strategies we use may not work as well, or they may lead us to leave out important context. For example, is your source not making eye contact with you because he is lying, embarrassed or otherwise evading accountability, or is he not making eye contact with you because he is autistic or otherwise neurodivergent and making eye contact is extremely uncomfortable him? Is your source fidgeting because she’s bored and not paying attention to you, or is she stimming because she has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and requires movement to focus on your words? Is your source wearing a mask because of health anxiety, or because COVID-19 and other respiratory disorders are a threat to their ability, livelihood, health and life? Does your source appear drunk, moving strangely and slurring her words, or does she have cerebral palsy?

 
Does someone’s story sound unbelievable because it contains accounts of medical abuse that seem far-fetched to you, or do you just not know how terribly the medical system tends to treat disabled people, especially women[1], especially racialized women[2]? Is this source’s story about being unable to access services proof that they cannot navigate the system properly or is it proof that their needs are not supported by the system? Or is it that, even if they are supported by the system, accessing these supports can be difficult and time-consuming? Or is it a combination of all of the above? When you cover a story involving alleged abuse by health-care professionals, do you make sure to have a voice say how hard it is to work in the health-care system or to “deal with” “difficult” patients? If you answered yes, do you have any other voices that can speak to how common medical abuse really is? Do you wonder whether the voices you include — and those you leave out — could subconsciously reinforce ableism and bias against disabled people?

 
When you hear such claims, do you tend to think to yourself that the source must have had another option, even if they say otherwise? Or do you respond with the just-world fallacy (“People get what they deserve, so if something bad happened to her, she must have done something to deserve it”)? (See Scope, Religious model.)

 
When an “expert” source dismisses the claims of another source, one with lived experience of the issue you’re covering, are you more inclined to think that the latter source is lying or mistaken? Or do you consider that expertise in one form of knowledge does not necessarily confer expertise in all matters pertaining to disability? Do you think that the “expert” source is more disinterested, and thus more “objective” and reliable, or do you consider that “expertise” might confer its own set of biases and assumptions?

The point is not, of course, that disabled people are always telling the truth, but that evaluating the credibility of sources often has more to do with the way that we deal with our internal biases than it does with the sources themselves. Reporting classes or other resources will have a lot to tell you about the practice of interviewing your sources and evaluating their credibility in the process; this section is meant to be, if not a check on the assumptions that underlie those practices, at least an invitation to think about them.

 
We journalists verify the sources of information we receive. We look for alternative sources or people who are saying the opposite of what our source says. That is just good journalism and part of the responsibility of our practice. And we should apply a healthy skepticism to our practice and our own internal biases; that’s the only way to fairly cover disability or illness or any other complex topic involving human beings — which is pretty much everything we love.