Scope

When I guest lecture to university students and media professionals about disability in the media, I sometimes start with a game. It’s based on the pencil-and-paper childhood classic MAD LIBS; I call out parts of speech, and people suggest examples. They see the sentences they’ve filled in only at the end. The result usually goes something like this:

• Sarah Trick has a carrot, but she doesn’t let that charm her from eating boxes. She has been rolling mice since she was 136 years old.
  
  “She’s so annoying,” says her mother. Her high school English teacher agrees. “Truly, Sarah is tiny.”

I get laughs because everyone has seen a disability story with this exact lead. And if I’m speaking to journalists or other media professionals, everyone in the audience has written a disability story with this exact lead, if they’ve ever covered disability at all — including me, and I certainly knew better. 

The lead goes like this:

• [Disabled person] has [condition], but she doesn’t let that stop her from [doing a thing usually completely unrelated to the condition].
  
  “She’s so inspirational,” says her relative. “She shows us what bravery looks like,” says some other person in her life with no expertise whatsoever on the situation.

What the disabled person inspires other people to do is not usually discussed because it’s not the point. Action is not required, only emotion — the emotion evoked in the able-bodied sources who are quoted and evoked in the presumed audience.

 
That lead is ubiquitous for a reason: it’s usually about a disabled person “overcoming the odds.” People like this story because it makes them feel good. It’s also incredibly shoddy, lazy reporting that causes active harm to the community it covers.

 
When I tell my audience that last part, they usually stop laughing and suddenly find they have trouble meeting my eyes. Most of the time, they don’t come right out and ask it, but I can see the question in their eyes: What’s wrong with that story? They like that story. They worked hard on that story. That story made them feel things: empathy, sympathy, anger. Isn’t that the point? 

 
It is not. Journalists are not, and should not be, activists, but they do have a responsibility to accurately reflect the communities they cover and live in. Disability is often considered a niche beat, but according to the 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability, 27 per cent of Canadians — more than one in four — have a disability [1].

 
The example lead above is a bad one for many reasons. It sits squarely within the genre of “inspiration porn,” so-called because its aim is not to tell the story of the disabled person as a subject but rather to make the disabled person an object to induce feelings of pity or gratitude in the audience. The point is to gratify the audience’s emotions, not to tell the subject’s true story. As well, this example story about a disabled person considers as primary sources not the disabled person but those around the disabled person — something that would not be acceptable in a story written about any other person or group, even in the first week of a first-year undergraduate reporting class.

And, most importantly for journalistic purposes, the story as framed here is not true, and it’s a journalist’s job to tell the truth. The person profiled is not “overcoming” their disability. They are living their life with their disability. “Overcoming” narratives do both sources and audiences of news stories a disservice, both because most disabilities cannot be overcome and because these narratives grant the subject personhood only when engaged in acts of overcoming or acts that can plausibly be framed as such [2].

 
When it comes to disability, journalists seem to be concerned primarily with offence. The Canadian Press style guide, for example, says of sensitive subjects that the “potential for offence lurks in every news story. Age, race, sex, disabilities, religion – all are sometimes pertinent to the news but must be handled thoughtfully.” [3] There seems to be awareness that there are certain common ways disabled people are portrayed that are nonetheless offensive or which hurt disabled people’s feelings. This may be a valid point; certainly, I would not disagree with those who say that positive representation matters. But journalists should find a lie most offensive of all. The “overcoming” story is a lie (as later sections explore). If we tell lies, if we propagate lies, if we rely on lies to scaffold our work, we are failing in the most profound and basic way. As journalists, we must, as always, start with the truth.

And disability in Canada is a beat that could use some serious, honest reporting. Disabled people are far more likely to live in poverty than their peers, and statistically they are behind in achieving typical life milestones and markers of life stability. They are less likely to pursue higher education, be married, own a home, or be employed — and if they are employed, they’re less likely to have jobs commensurate with their educational level [4]. Accessible, affordable rental housing is rare, and subsidized housing units can have long waiting lists, which are difficult to access in the first place [5]. The supply of accessible housing is shrinking all the time: developers tend not to build new housing with accessible units as such housing is bigger and can fit fewer people. However, this leaves disabled people, many of whom rely on fixed incomes well under the poverty line, with nowhere to live. Even before the rapid rise of inflation in 2023 and 2024, many disabled people were choosing between food, rent and medicine. Now, many people don’t even have that choice to make.

 
Disabled people are anywhere from three to five times more likely to experience sexual assault or other violence than non-disabled peers [6]. They are less likely to have access to reproductive and other forms of routine health care, meaning illnesses normally caught in routine screenings are often missed [7]. And they are more likely to be institutionalized at younger ages [8]. As journalists, our coverage should shine a light on these structural barriers to participation in society.

 
As well, disability stories are health-care stories, economy stories, education stories, arts and culture stories and pretty much any other kind of story a journalist could cover. In short, disability is not a niche beat. It’s the story of many, if not most, people’s lives — many people will, if nothing else, acquire disabilities as they age or have loved ones who will do so. And, yet most journalists don’t know how to cover disability with nuance. This has consequences not only for how coverage is shaped but also for disabled people, who do not see themselves represented in news products and communications. This absence from the narrative isn’t only, or even primarily, about disabled people feeling included — it can cost lives. Think, for example, of any story about a community that has to be evacuated. Officials will tell people to “get in their car and get out of the area” and provide no guidance for those who cannot leave [9].

 
Think also of who has been most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and who we assume to be the audience for our coverage. Disabled people are more likely to be classified as “those with underlying conditions.” Their risks are often underestimated because disabled people have been studied less and results affecting them haven’t been publicized widely, yet studies have shown that people with developmental disabilities such as Down syndrome, autism, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, or cerebral palsy were 16 times more likely to die than their peers in the same age group [10]. Other studies have shown that disabled people, on average, stayed in hospital longer, were more likely to be readmitted after discharge, and were more likely to have long-term consequences, such as reduced mobility upon leaving the hospital. (I say “were” here not because this is not still true, but because I don’t know whether there’s ever been a follow-up.)

 
As we move into a “post-COVID” era and face still other public-health concerns, journalists have repeated public-health messaging [11] — “the vulnerable should still protect themselves” [12] — often without subjecting it to scrutiny or analysis, or even asking the most basic questions: 

• Who are the “vulnerable”?
• What does “protecting themselves” mean?
• For how long should they do this?
• In what settings are people most in need of such protection? (If it’s health care, why is the protection the responsibility of the patient?)
• How should they do this, and how should they pay for it? 

Disabled people are not only more likely to be affected by the COVID-19 virus itself but also among the most severely impacted by mitigation measures: people in group homes, for example, didn’t see family members for weeks, months, or even years. Community services for disabled people closed at the beginning of the pandemic, and when most other things reopened, many of those services for disabled people stayed closed, with no plans for returning. Some of these services were the primary source of social connection, support and even basic necessities, like food and clothing, for people who needed them. Services that remain have fewer resources but are supporting more and more people with more and more complex needs. Yet journalistic coverage often frames this as the natural consequence of “vulnerability” in a “post-COVID” world, rather than as the result of deliberate, calculated policy choices.

And more people are becoming disabled all the time. The figure I quoted from the 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability — 27 per cent of Canadians identify as disabled — increased five percentage points from the 2017 survey. If that doesn’t seem like that big a jump, remember that these are percentage points, not percentages; the disabled population in Canada increased from just over one-fifth to just over one-quarter. And we know this is an undercount because it excludes the entire population of long-term care and similar facilities. Issues affecting at least one-quarter of the Canadian population are issues journalists need to cover as a matter of basic competence.

 
Most reporters want to do a good job covering disability. They realize it is a serious topic worthy of attention, care and skill. But the pressures of daily news — to be first, to write quickly, to be credible, to be objective, to find “expert” sources, to be out in the field and to find good visuals or audio to go with your script — don’t lend themselves well to disability reporting. Disabled sources are harder to find, harder to access, harder to shoot and harder to establish as credible. Sometimes they may use communication methods or languages, such as American Sign Language, with which many reporters and editors are not familiar. It often takes more time to interview disabled sources, which isn’t easy when working on deadline.

 
Reporters do the best they know how, but even so, the disabled community tends to find the resulting coverage anywhere from alienating to downright insulting, which then makes it harder for reporters to gain the trust of disabled sources for future coverage. That trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose, and I believe that’s because disabled sources and media professionals are working from different sets of assumptions and, to some extent, different values.

 
To cover disability well, we journalists need to apply a disability lens to our reporting. This guide will help show you how to do that.