Disability and the Media in the 21st Century

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0275-7982(2011)0000006012
• Pages: 181-218
• Date: 14 October 2011
• Published date: 14 October 2011
• Author: Doris Zames Fleischer,Frieda Zames

DISABILITY AND THE MEDIA IN

THE 21ST CENTURY

Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames

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ABSTRACT

The research for this study engages and assesses the relationship of the

media from the 20th to the 21st century, combining scholar activism and

public leadership in the disability rights movement. Having chronicled the

disability rights movement from its roots, this chapter presents the

discourse of media and movement, sampling mainstream media along with

the advocacy and alternative media in support of disability rights. A range

of media forms are engaged from advocacy bulletins to mainstream news

media to public broadcasts that represent the diversity and complexity of

the movement as it continues into the 21st century, pressing for the

universalism of human rights for all.

A Mediated History

Journalist John Hockenberry, who travels throughout the world in the

wheelchair he uses as a result of a spinal cord injury, asked,

Why aren’t people with disabilities a source of reassurance to the general public that

although life is unpredictable and circumstances may be unfavorable, versatility and

adaptation are possible; they’re built into the coding of human beings? (Interview, 1998)

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Deceased.

Human Rights and Media

Studies in Communications, Volume 6, 181–218

Copyright r2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 0275-7982/doi:10.1108/S0275-7982(2011)0000006012

181

The story of how disability has been covered in the media reveals that, on

the contrary, those bringing that story to the public have not viewed

disability as Hockenberry has suggested they might. Rather, from the joint

conspiracy – of the media, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his associates – to

keep FDR’s disability as secret as possible, to the exploitation of pity –

especially using children with disabilities – to raise money, to the neglect or

distortion of the reality of people with disabilities, the mainstream media

with its biases and filters have not successfully carried out its responsibility.

Yet, people with disabilities have made considerable progress in ensuring

that the media gives the public an accurate picture of this population,

whereas they have learned strategies that enable them to use the media to

counter the stereotypical negative images with which the wider society has

burdened them. Relative to all that has been accomplished, there is much

more that needs to be achieved. The disability population (57 million in the

United States alone and growing) is the only minority all people can – and

probably will – join if they live long enough. Almost everyone has loved

ones, especially grandparents and parents, who are or will be members of

this population. In addition, when people with disabilities can be self-

sufficient, contributing members of society, everyone benefits. As a result,

the goals of this population – inclusion and equality – serve the entire

society. Thus, it is incumbent upon the mainstream media not to allow

ignorance, prejudice, or apathy to prevent them from fulfilling their

professional obligation to accurately reflect the truth about people with

disabilities. The media both reflect and influence the views and opinions of

the wider public, and this assumption is a dialectical basis for the research

on movements and media.

FDR AND THE ‘‘VEIL OF SILENCE’’

The relationship between Franklin Delano Roosevelt – the only President

with an unmistakable disability – and the media reveals the difference

between the reality of and the myths about disability. With the country

experiencing a devastating economic depression followed by a calamitous

world war, the public required that the leader of the country be perceived as

capable and vigorous, two attributes presumed to be antithetical to

disability. Though FDR was a wheelchair user, many were so insistent

upon viewing him either as ‘‘cured’’ of polio or as never having been

disabled that they engaged in almost a public denial. In her New York Times

column, Maureen Dowd (1996), recounting the story her father told

DORIS ZAMES FLEISCHER ET AL.182

her, revealed the extent of this refusal to recognize Roosevelt’s mobility

impairment:

In the 30’s my father, a D.C. police detective, traveled to the Deep South to bring back a

prisoner for trial. As he waited at the railroad station to come home, some nasty-looking

vagrants surrounded him.

‘‘You’re from Washington,’’ one said to him. ‘‘Do you see the President?’’

‘‘Yes,’’ replied my father, who worked on protective details for President Roosevelt.

‘‘There are some ugly rumors going around that the President is a cripple,’’ the bum

growled. ‘‘We’re going to kill any man says that’s true.’’

‘‘The President,’’ my father lied pleasantly, ‘‘is a fine, athletic man.’’ [which, because

Roosevelt swam frequently, was indeed true].

Even as Dowd was commenting on the public misconception about the

President, she fell prey to the common fallacy that Roosevelt promoted this

effort to hide his disability because of his courage. Rather, appreciating the

impossibility of being elected or governing were the public to acknowledge

his disability, Roosevelt encouraged what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin

refers to as the ‘‘unspoken code of honor:’’

In twelve years, not a single picture was ever printed of the President in his wheelchair.

No newsreel had ever captured him being lifted into or out of his car. When he was

shown in public, he appeared either standing behind a podium, seated in an ordinary

chair, or leaning on the arm of a colleague. If, as occasionally happened, one of the

members of the press corps sought to violate the code by sneaking a picture of the

President looking helpless, one of the older photographers would ‘‘accidentally’’ block

the shot or gently knock the camera to the ground. But such incidents were rare; by and

large, the ‘‘veil of silence’’ about the extent of Roosevelt’s handicap was accepted by

everyone – Roosevelt, the press, and the American people. (Goodwin, 1994)

Without this deception, FDR could never have been the powerful and

effective president that he became. Yet because his success required this

dissembling, in which the media was complicit, the disability population has

not benefited as it might have from the public’s awareness that this towering

figure in the 20th century was disabled. We can only conjecture about how

the dissemination of this truth might have reversed the stigma of disability.

Moreover, in spite of the achievements of the disability community in the

almost 70 years since FDR was President, with the prominence of

investigative reporting in combination with the medium of television, it is

unlikely that a person with a significant disability, such as FDR’s, could

become President at the beginning of the 21st century.

Disability and the Media in the 21st Century 183