Audiences and sources

My first and most important tip is this: If they’re in the audience for your work, they can also be your sources. If they are alive, they are potentially in your audience.

If you think of someone as part of your potential audience, you are more likely to consider them as potential sources. Doing so will change the nature of your stories over time, because when you think of someone as part of your audience, you are more likely to consider concerns and questions relevant to them. There is no demographic that can be excluded from your potential audience and pool of sources solely on the basis of disability.

But what do I mean by that?

Let’s take the example of long-term care. (And note here that I used the full term “long-term care” here rather than the abbreviation LTC. For more on that, see Language, Abbreviations)

Staff in long-term-care homes effectively never have time to give adequate care[1]. Residents do not get to control what they eat, where they live, with whom they live, who provides care, or what they do with their day[2]. Violence is common[3]. Some residents are sedated without their permission or without the consent of their relatives. In some areas, facilities are not required to provide adequate heating or air circulation. Residents are often required to give up assets and end up living at bare minimum levels of subsistence. Being left in a dirty piece of incontinence-wear for several hours at a time is not just normal — it’s standard practice. Being left without a shower for days and days on end is not just normal — it’s standard practice[4].

 
During the COVID-19 pandemic, residents in long-term care were confined to the homes during outbreaks as a matter of course. During the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, long-term-care facilities made headlines as outbreaks proliferated and residents died. When Canadian Armed Forces reported back on the conditions that they’d seen while assisting in a number of Ontario facilities, there was widespread shock about the extent of the neglect and abandonment.

But how many stories did you see that interviewed a resident living in a long-term-care facility during that time? I saw precisely three; and I made a point of looking. One of them was by the CBC. Another was in the Local section of the New York Times. The third, a feature in Broadview magazine by Meagan Gillmore, covered younger adults in long-term care who were stuck there while searching for accessible housing and/or attendant care options in the community[5]. Gillmore’s story was honoured by Canada’s National Magazine Awards, and deservedly so, but it did not deal with the population most commonly associated with long-term care: older adults.

 
Certainly, long-term-care homes were kept isolated from the public during the COVID-19 epidemic, ostensibly for the protection of the residents. But we journalists managed to do other coverage in circumstances just as challenging, so why were there no investigative teams trying to see what was going on by talking to residents? And, certainly, family advocates can be important voices, but they are not the voices of those principally concerned with COVID-19-mitigation efforts, their impact, and their success or failure in long-term-care homes. Those principally concerned are the people who live and die with the ramifications of these decisions, over which they have no control: the residents themselves. And this was not new: in the pre-COVID era, journalists were generally not great at letting people in long-term care speak for themselves in stories.

 
So, what’s at issue here is who is considered worthy of comment and of being interviewed. Frequently during COVID-19, journalists covering long-term care talked to family members concerned they were unable to see their parents, or journalists talked to advocates raising the alarm about abuses they were seeing during that time. We journalists did not cover residents of long-term care as main characters of the story — often not even as characters in the story at all. The residents were treated simply as objects of suffering, or as vehicles to show the suffering of their loved ones.

 
And, on the whole, we continue not to interview long-term-care residents now, despite the fact that they are a “vulnerable group” that “still needs to take precautions” but has little control over how those precautions are implemented.

I do not believe there was a deliberate decision made by journalists to exclude the disabled people who live in long-term-care homes as sources. What concerns me is that they may not have been considered as possible sources at all.

 
You may be asking: But what about family members and advocates — aren’t they reasonable sources? Some people really can’t speak for themselves, and we have to find others who can tell their story to the public, you might say.

 
Certainly, many residents of long-term care might have cognitive disabilities, speech problems, deficits in memory and other disabilities that might make them more difficult to interview. But many others do not have these problems, and most important, the presence of one or more of these problems does not, in and of itself, exclude a potential source from consideration.

 
In order to exclude a potential source, you would actually have to figure out whether such factors make them less credible. If a source has trouble speaking or is hard of hearing, for example, could an interview be conducted using assistive technology or old-fashioned pen and paper? If a source has memory problems, that could mean anything from “is in late-stage dementia” to “has problems with working memory but is alert and oriented and consistent in their story.” Which is it?

 
There is no human being who is “voiceless,” because there is no human being who does not communicate. There are human beings who, by reason of access or credibility, may not be appropriate sources, but journalists should be skeptical of claims that an advocate is a disabled person’s only true voice. The more stridently an advocate insists upon this, the more skeptical we journalists should be and the more alert we should be to a possible abuse of power.

 
We’ll get more into the upsides and pitfalls of using advocates as sources later in this section. For now, let’s talk about how we go about the process of finding our sources.