Monitoring the Media

By Andrew Laing, Cormex Research and Mihaela Dinca-Panaitescu, DRPI-Canada

How do people come to learn about the issues that face people with disabilities? For people who have a disability, the answer is easy: it’s first-hand, all day and every day. Many people, however, learn about disability issues from the media—and books, television, newspapers, and online media can influence even those who have personal experiences with disabilities. 

Media both reflect and influence the attitudes of society toward disability. Recognizing the media’s impact, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) requires governments to take steps to encourage media to portray people with disabilities in a manner that advances disability as a human rights issue. This means a move from viewing people with disabilities as “objects” of medical treatment and social protection to viewing them as holders of rights who make decisions for their lives. 

The Disability Rights Promotion International project, headed by Professor Marcia Rioux of York University in Toronto, responded to this call by making media monitoring a key component of its holistic approach to disability rights monitoring in its efforts to give teeth to the monitoring requirements called for in the CRPD and other human rights instruments. 

This approach brings together three focus areas in order to provide a holistic report on the implementation of the rights of people with disabilities: 

- Individual experiences Monitoring: Gathering information about the human rights situation of people with disabilities. 

- Media Monitoring: Examining coverage and depiction of disability issues and people with disabilities in the media. 

- Systemic Monitoring: Assessing the effectiveness of laws, policies and programs in protecting disability rights. 

Taking up the challenge of media monitoring, a group of Canadian and international academic researchers, media experts, students and people within the disability community from four countries (Canada, India, Sweden and the U.S.) got together to develop a methodology and a “toolbox” that disability groups could use to monitor, assess and challenge media portrayals of disability issues in their jurisdictions from a rights perspective. A pilot project was launched to assess the Canadian news content about disability issues, the types of disability portrayed and, most important, whether the stories recognize a disability issue as a rights issue. Some insights from the Canadian experiment are: 

Does one newspaper tend to devote more attention to disability topics than rival papers? The Toronto Star, Canada’s biggest newspaper by circulation, published the most news items about disability among the 11 papers surveyed. However, there was only a marginal difference between the Star and several other newspapers, including the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald and Vancouver Sun. There was also little difference among newspapers regarding the coverage by type of disability. 

Do the newspapers give voice to people with disabilities in their stories? To a degree, yes, they do. Approximately 42 percent of coverage came from one of three sources: advocates for people with disabilities (8 percent), family, friends and caregivers (13 percent), and people with disabilities themselves (21 percent). One-third of the coverage quoted or cited a person with a disability. 

Do the stories on disability issues recognize these issues as rights issues or not? This is an important question that helps us understand how the media convey disability rights information to the public. The Canadian study indicates that some stories applied a pro-rights lens in framing disability issues. For example, some stories had highlighted systemic failures, lack of resources and inadequate policy when it came to accessing appropriate treatments, affordable housing or education. Coverage of homelessness and inadequate housing situations across Canada often referred to people with mental disabilities and a person’s right to an adequate standard of living. 

However, there were still many stories that reflected the traditional medical and “super-crip” frames. For example, most of the stories pertaining to “access to sports and culture”—the second most frequently reported right in the media, featured specific cases, of individuals—in many cases celebrities—who “overcame” their disabilities to participate in a sport or cultural activity. In the same vein, a significant amount of stories concerning a person’s access to health care and rehabilitative services invoked the traditional medical perspective by emphasizing novel treatments ready for people to use, but not necessarily their entitlement to treatment. 

In spite of certain positive elements in media coverage of disability issues, the Canadian media must be encouraged to offer less counter-productive frames concerning people with disabilities and provide their audiences with a more realistic portrayal of the human rights challenges faced by people with disabilities.