Disability

• About 1 in 6 people in the UK have some form of disability
• All forms of disability are consistently underrepresented in the media
• The biomedical view of disability suggests disability is an objective issue with a person's body or mind
• The social view of disability says it is socially constructed by a lack of accommodation in society - it is society that disables an individual
• Biomedical may place too much emphasis on there being an issue, but social may ignore the real struggles some people have that cannot be changed via society eg chronic pain
• Many disabled people were portrayed as a burden to those around them, or else pitiable or incapable
• Disabled people were more likely to be villains - eg James Bond franchise, Captain Hook
• Sometimes disabled representation would overcompensate and portray disabled people as superheroes - even in real life eg Stephen Hawking
• Shakespeare argued disabled people were presented to the audience in terms of their impairment, not their character as a whole, and presented them as the 'other' in the binary pair of abled and disabled
• Barnes said charitable programs like Children In Need may still convey stereotypes that disabled people need help from able bodied people
• Williams-Findlay found that when disability was covered in the news, it was reported as tragic and to elicit sympathy
• Watson et al found that disability was often reported alongside welfare dependency, creating a stigma that they were scroungers despite having legitimate claims to benefits
• Gauntlett points out that there are increasingly positive representations with smaller audiences
• New Media means disabled people can present their day to day lives, talk about their struggles and successes, and provide support for others
• Those with no experience of disability may accept media messages, while those who had experience tended to reject them