Shape in the Media approach towards disability

The actual Media system is a complicated relationship between editorial agenda and audience. Editors and producers decide which stories report on basing on what can make news or suggest interest across their audience.
The key point is simple: tell something unconventional, different or that can create debate and oppositions. People don’t like happy endings, and a plain world without problems to be solved, issues to discuss on and challenges to prove your determination and success will not be a human world. What will be news?


Impact the audience

The structure of any stories is based on conflict. Consequently what raises interest from the ordinary life is actually the difference and the challenge connected to. Stories on different bodies, on different people push up the audience rate.
Newspaper, magazines sell millions of copies on gossip and scandals. TVs compete in reality shows and factual programmes, where the philosophy of a famous and rich perfect body dominates and dictates trends. There are few documentaries aim to open the audience towards diversity. In the West, the Media system has created his small world based on stereotypes, prejudices, and frail certainty.

Disable people are the opposite face of the coin.


The word disability 
Disable people are different from an able body person. Not because they are less or more, better or worst. They are different because the wide range and variety of their peculiarities make actually impossible to put them in a large pan and identify them with a specific name. 


However, the Media system can do just that. Classifying them as disable person as showing their difference as a problem.
But do you know how many visual impaired there are which their singular sight? Or what are all the different medical issues for a wheelchair user?
Every disable person is different from another disable, and what makes both of them similar is the fact they are not the same as an able body.

Stories on disability 

Based on that difference, it is easy for the Media call all of them just disable people, and represent them with a stress on their impairments and problems.
Obviously this attitude can be seen as discrimination and, in the same time, exclusion from the “able” world. But the real reason is that is the only way the actual Media system is able to represent them, because it lacks skills in understanding the meaning to be disable. If the editorial agenda of the Media is decided by  "able" people how can they change their reporting on disability if the haven’t experienced what being disable means? They have no idea on the voyager that every day a disable person has to do in order to live and do the same things every one of us do.

The shift is up to us. It is possible to change how we perceive disable people, but it need a complete shift in our mind and our representation of the whole world.

Shape  the Media system

Media can report differently on disability if they have knowledge on living a disable life. This means shaping the actual government settings and establishment. It is needed a change in story telling: the focus needs to move on other principles instead on the superficial perfect body every one of us dreams.

Change stories, change prospective on things, on values to communicate.
It will be a long journey toward a more mature human being.

People are fed up by this system focused on appearance and money, where if you do not fit in the bespoken society you are out. People want a more honest, truthful and open-minded place to love in.
The miss-understood assumptions and generalisations about disability lead to broad the meaning of this world.
Nowadays disabilities can cover everything. All the misfits people in the society. All the people with mental health issues, physical problems, social and relational difficulties. 
The question comes straightforward: who is not disable?


Understanding the diversity

The first step is to understand the meaning of being “disable”. The term disable used nowadays stresses on the difference from a fully able body. Dis+able, or not able. 
However, this term can mean not having the same abilities. Difference doesn’t mean less, but suggests diversity and enrichment. A blind person boosts his/her hearing and sense of touch because he/she can't see properly. A deaf person can read your mouth and your body language with an unbelievable precision, understanding perfectly what are you saying and how do you feel.


Understanding the difference and incorporating it in the system as a valuable research are the key of the progress and the secret of growing.

The shape in the Media starts from that understanding. Change of prospective and editorial agenda, change in reporting and journalists, change in the world flexibility.

Obviously this is going together with a change in the audience. What the audience wants and find interesting to see, to listen, to experience.
Education and families are extremely important in change prospective.


Including the difference without prejudice, instead of underlying it.

Paralympics as a chance to start differently

The challenge of Channel 4 in reporting on the 2012 Paralympics can be a chance. The turning point as well as the beginning of a shape in the Media. What the meaning and the future of these new disable reporters and presenters? We hope they are not going to fade as noctilucent starlights.