Media And Disability Analysis

Media Alters the Way We See the Poor and Disabled
Media could be an individual’s source of gathering information about the current real world; however, the media can choose to show only one side of the story, whether it is a positive or negative outlook. In today’s society, media has a malicious effect on the people who doesn’t have a sufficient amount of money and the people who are physically or mentally handicapped. William J. Peace and Gloria Watkins, also known as Bell Hooks, closely observed both victims and provide evidence that the media is attacking them because they’re less fortunate or “not normal.” While Peace and Watkins blames the media for only showing the negative side of the poor and disabled, I believe that this negativity
Peace, a handicapped teacher and scholar who wrote about the disabled in his essay Slippery Slopes: Media Disability and Adaptive Sports, said that the media’s narrow depictions of disability are very distorted. He further went and said “the negative portrayal of disabled people is not only oppressive but also affirms that the nondisabled people set the terms of the debate about the meaning of disability” (676). Because of the media, there has been a stereotype of the disabled. The assumptions set for them is that the physical and mental deficits that they may have precludes them from not just an interest in sports but the ability to participate (678). The only time the mass media focuses on the disabled is when they can make the news into a ‘feel-good story.’ For an example, I’ll demonstrate this into two scenarios. First, picture an amputee with one leg going to the grocery store to buy food to cook for dinner, and then imagine another amputee with one leg finishing first in a national race. Which story would most likely be on the cover of numerous news articles? The answer is the amputee who won the national race because the clear majority of the public would have never expected to read about a story like that. The media doesn’t celebrate or highlight the athletic or personal achievement instead they value the ability of a disabled person to “overcome” his or her physical deficit (677). The worst part is that the more obvious and impossible the story may sound,
The more privileged professors and students made comments that painted an entirely different picture than that of Watkins. They almost always pictured the poor as “shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest, and unworthy.” Students at Stanford University would automatically, without a doubt, assume that anything that was missing had to have been taken by the poor black or Filipina women janitors who worked there. This stereotype was caused by the media. In today’s society, the media makes the poor seem like criminals or without values. For an example, when you watch a movie that narrates the main character coming from a financially unstable background, the main character would often get into illegal activity to make money to support themselves. This in return causes viewers to devalue the poor because they believe that all poor people will eventually act as the movie character did; however, Watkins argues that “nobody’s value could be measured by material standards” (484). She adds, “Value was connected to integrity, to being honest and hardworking.” Watkins demonstrates that this is true through her own experience. She was taught by “the poor, the disenfranchised, and the underclass, to be always be a person of her word” (485). Those same individuals taught her how to stand up for what she believed was right and to be both brave and courageous. These statements contradict what the media was saying about people