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April 24, 2018 / C H Thompson

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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