Media Representations of Disability
- The GMG have noticed over the past 10 years there’s been a reduction in newspaper articles using sympathetic and deserving adjectives to describe disabled people and instead there’s been a growing incidence of linking disability to benefit fraud
- Terms like scrounger, cheat, and skiver being most common as if being disabled is a lifestyle choice and therefore undeserving of welfare
- These negative stereotypes also apply to people with mental health issues. In a study of TV drama sociologists found negative story-lines attributed to characters with mental illness
- Media stereotypes of disability tend to portray disabled people as:
- Pitiful or pathetic
- Sinister or evil
- As a burden
- Non-sexual
- Unable to participate in daily-life
- Their own worst enemy
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