disability awareness

Journalist Works to Improve Coverage, Accessibility of News for the Public

Posted on September 12, 2021

By Rachel Konieczny

National Center on Disability and Journalism

Hannah Wise is on a mission to improve the coverage of disability in the U.S. and make sure news is accessible to the more than 6 million Americans who live with a disability.

Wise is one of eight Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship recipients for the 2021-22 academic year. Formerly a social strategy editor at The New York Times, Wise brings to the project years of experience building relationships between journalists and the communities they cover at the Times and the Dallas Morning News.

For her fellowship at the University of Missouri, she is creating a toolkit to help newsrooms understand how to better cover disability and how to make news products more accessible.

“Every beat is a disability beat, and not just around disability awareness,” Wise said. “It is our job as journalists to speak with accuracy and avoid euphemism, and I think that there’s a big opportunity across the industry for us to raise the bar.”

Part of her project entails creating a form for news organizations to use to find out what questions readers have about disability and what local and national coverage they would like to see.

“We want to make sure that we are providing the information that people want and need,” she said. “The best way to do that is to ask them: What do you want and need?”

In addition to helping news organizations improve their coverage of disability, she hopes to help them learn and use accessibility technology, such as alt text, captions and screen readers.

Wise said part of the challenge is that people are uncomfortable dealing with disability, and journalists are no exception. “Unless you have a disability or someone in your sphere has one, then people are just kind of like, ‘I don’t want to offend anyone’,” she said.

She said the current pandemic makes it more important than ever for journalists to include perspectives from the disability community in their stories.

“I view my job as a journalist to help my community and my readers live smarter, healthier, happier, and more equitable lives,” she said. “At the core, our job is to provide information that people can then take and digest and then inform whatever decision they are going to make.”

As part of her project, Wise, who identifies as a disabled journalist, also created a newsletter, “Disability Matters.” To sign up, go to https://gmail.us6.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=38c612681d8b3e13200731c90&id=137008ef16.

The New York Times, NCDJ Partner to Enhance Coverage of Disability Issues

Posted on March 8, 2021
NCDJ logo and New York Times logo together on black and grey grid.

By Kasey Brammell

The National Center on Disability and Journalism at Arizona State University is partnering with The New York Times to create a new fellowship program to enhance coverage of disability issues and people with disabilities.

The program, to launch later this year, will place an early-career journalist in The Times newsroom each year for the next two years to develop expertise and report on a range of disability issues. It is set to be funded by philanthropy.

The fellow will be part of a larger fellowship cohort at The Times and will receive mentoring from both a Times’ staff member with expertise in covering disabilities and the NCDJ, which provides support and advice to journalists around the world who cover such issues. The NCDJ also will provide training to the Times’ newsroom.

Nearly one in five people in the United States lives with a disability, but these issues are undercovered, said Ted Kim, director of Early Career Journalism Strategy and Recruiting for The New York Times. “Few avenues exist to develop journalistic expertise on disability issues because such beats do not exist at most news outlets,” he said. “The lack of coverage, in turn, results in a lack of awareness about issues that affect a large portion of the country.”

Kristin Gilger, interim dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU and director of the NCDJ, echoed the need for more and better coverage of disability issues and people with disabilities. “This fellowship program is an important step in the right direction at one of the nation’s top media institutions,” she said.

The application is now open for the first fellow, who will join The Times in June. Preference will be given to promising early-career journalists who also have experience living with a disability or who have developed a deep understanding of disability through the experiences of a family member or loved one. The deadline to submit an application is 5 p.m., New York Time, on March 31, 2021. Applicants are advised to submit well before the deadline.

The fellows will be part of The New York Times Fellowship program , a talent pipeline initiative started in 2019 to seed and diversify the next generation of journalists in local newsrooms across America. It trains journalists in reporting, audio, visual and other disciplines.

The National Center on Disability and Journalism is a service of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU. For the past 12 years at Cronkite, the center has provided support and training for journalists and other communications professionals with the goal of improving media coverage of disability issues and people with disabilities.

COVID-19 is creating communication barriers for the deaf community

Posted on June 23, 2020

For many people who are deaf or hard of hearing, lip reading, facial expressions and body language are vital to communication, but protective face masks and remote work and school meant to slow the spread of COVID-19 have made it more difficult.

More than 1.1 million people in Arizona are hard of hearing, and more than 20,000 are deaf, according to the Arizona Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

You can read the full article here.

Living with a disability during a pandemic

Posted on June 15, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a number of inequalities in our society related to race, gender, class, legal status and age. However, conspicuously missing from much of the media coverage on these issues are the stories of how the crisis is affecting the disabled community.

Read the full article here: https://asunow.asu.edu/20200612-sun-devil-life-living-disability-during-pandemic

Arizonans: Share Your Story About Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Posted on June 9, 2020

The Arizona Daily Star and ProPublica want to hear about your experiences with intellectual and developmental disabilities services. Join storytelling coaches, journalists and the Detour Company Theatre on July 8 to get involved.

Read the full article here: https://https://www.propublica.org/article/arizonans-share-your-story-about-intellectual-and-developmental-disabilities-at-our-virtual-event

NCDJ Accepting Entries in Annual Disability Reporting Contest

Posted on May 14, 2020

NCDJ 2020 Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability

May 15, 2020

The National Center on Disability and Journalism is now accepting entries for the 2020 Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability, the only journalism contest devoted exclusively to disability coverage.

Winners will receive a total of $8,000 in cash awards for first-, second- and third-place finishes in large media and small media categories. First-place winners in each category will be awarded $2,500 and invited to give a public lecture for the Cronkite School in fall 2020. Second-place winners will receive $1,000, third-place winners $500.

Journalists working in digital, print and broadcast media are eligible to enter. Entries are accepted from outside the U.S., although the work submitted must be in English. There is no entry fee.

Entries must have been published or aired between July 1, 2019, and July 31, 2020. The deadline to enter is Aug. 17, 2020. For more information and to enter, go to https://ncdj.org/contest/.

Entries are judged by professional journalists and experts on disability issues. Past judges have included “PBS NewsHour” anchor Judy Woodruff; Tony Coelho, former six-term U.S. congressman from California and the primary sponsor of the Americans With Disabilities Act; former Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Leon Dash; and Daniel Burke, CNN religion editor.

The top 2019 award in the large media category went to an investigation into a New York City initiative to let those with severe mental illnesses live on their own. The project was a collaboration of ProPublica, The New York Times and PBS Frontline. The first-place winner in the small media category was a collaborative documentary between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Milwaukee PBS. The program followed the lives of four young people from Wisconsin as they navigated mental health challenges. To read more about the 2019 award-winners, visit https://cronkite.asu.edu/news-and-events/news/propublica-and-pbs-frontline-milwaukee-journal-sentinel-and-milwaukee-pbs-win.

For all the past winners, visit https://ncdj.org/contest/ncdj-contest-archive/.

The Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability is administered each year by the NCDJ, which is part of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. It is supported by a gift from Katherine Schneider, a retired clinical psychologist who also supports the Schneider Family Book Award, honoring the best children’s book each year that captures the disability experience for children and adolescents. That award is administered by the American Library Association.

Schneider, who has been blind since birth, said she hopes the award will help journalists improve their coverage of disability issues, moving beyond “inspirational” stories that don’t accurately represent the lives of people with disabilities. “That kind of stuff is remarkable, but that’s not life as most of us live it,” she said.

The NCDJ, which has been housed at the Cronkite School since 2008, offers resources and materials for journalists covering disability issues and topics, including a widely used disability language stylebook. For more information, visit the NCDJ’s website at https://ncdj.org.

Willie Levi, 73, Dies; He Escaped a Life of Servitude

Posted on May 1, 2020

 

A man wearing a red baseball cap looks into the camera.
Willie Levi in 2013. Intellectually disabled, he spent years working at a turkey-processing plant for $65 a month but found justice in a successful lawsuit. Photo: Nicole Bengiveno, The New York Times

By Dan Barry, The New York Times

Willie Levi died at the age of 73 on April 23 after contracting the novel coronavirus.

Levi, who lived with an intellectual disability, was part of a successful Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit that fought for proper pay and working conditions for people with disabilities.

Levi was sent from his hometown of Orange, Texas to Iowa, where he worked alongside other men at a turkey-processing plant for decades. According to The New York Times, the men worked “in virtual servitude” for Henry’s Turkey Service.

Although Levi never made it back to Orange while he was alive, after his passing he was set to be buried in the same historic African-American cemetery that holds the remains of his mother, according to The New York Times.

Read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/willie-levi-73-dies-he-escaped-a-life-of-servitude.html?referringSource=articleShare

State Policies May Send People with Disabilities to the Back of the Line for Ventilators

Posted on April 12, 2020

Vestavia Hills, Alabama, resident Matthew Foster, who has Down syndrome, holds a sign reading: "I am ventilator worthy! I want the right to live"
Vestavia Hills, Alabama, resident Matthew Foster, who has Down syndrome, worries he could be in the back of the line for a ventilator if he contracts severe COVID-19. Half of states have policies with the type of provisions that advocates say discriminate against people with disabilities. (Photo Courtesy of Susan Ellis)

By Liz Essley Whyte, Center for Public Integrity/The Daily Beast

An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity reveals that policies in at least 25 U.S. states have provisions that could de-prioritize health care for people with disabilities if cases of COVID-19 continue to ravage hospitals’ supplies.

Disability advocates have filed formal complaints in several states for their policies on who should get ventilators if hospitals run out. These policies take into account patients’ expected lifespan; need for resources, such as home oxygen; or specific diagnoses, such as dementia. Some policies even permit hospitals to take ventilators away from patients who use them as breathing aids in everyday life, and give the ventilators to other patients.

Twenty-five states have similar provisions in their rationing policies — and many other states either don’t have policies, or aren’t releasing them.

“There is a long history of people with disabilities being devalued by the medical system. That’s why we have civil rights laws,” said disability-rights activist Ari Ne’eman. “We don’t have an exception in our country’s civil rights laws for clinical judgment. We don’t take it on trust.”

Read the full article here: https://publicintegrity.org/health/coronavirus-and-inequality/state-policies-may-send-people-with-disabilities-to-the-back-of-the-line-for-ventilators/