Disability & Media Alliance Project starts a blog

The Disability & Media Alliance Project (D-MAP) is part of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund's (DREDF) new media initiative. Here's what it says about its new blog:

We established the Disability & Media Alliance Project (D-MAP) to work in alliance with the media industry to change inaccurate public perceptions of disability and replace them with informed and realistic stories and images. We want to broaden the range of popular ideas about disability to go beyond the usual suspects: condescending stares for tragic lives on the one extreme, and admiring awe for superhuman transcendence of obstacles on the other. People with disabilities are neither inspirational heroes nor social parasites, neither courageous underdogs nor charity cases. We are ordinary people with ordinary and highly varied lives. Like everyone else, we’d like to see our lives depicted in the news and in entertainment.

Where do the deep-seated social stereotypes come from? Plays, films, novels, and television shows that include people with disabilities have a literally “storied” history from ancient times to the present: Hephaestus and Tiresias, Quasimodo and Captain Hook, Heidi and Tiny Tim and Pollyanna, Dr. Strangelove and the Phantom of the Opera, the Seven Dwarfs and the Munchkins, Captain Ahab and Richard III. These and other characters reflect and reinforce the idea that disability is dangerous or evil or pitiable.

Such characters continue to appear, from scary Freddy Krueger to sweet Forrest Gump. Their images hover over the disability community because their influence is so pervasive that it echoes in common public idea about disability. The negative perceptions create distrust and distance between people with and without disabilities. The apparently positive perceptions do damage because they suggest that people with disabilities should aspire to be superheroes or to “overcome” their impairments. The perceptions that seem sympathetic often instead invoke an isolating model of charity. And none of these perceptions reflects day-to-day life with a disability.

We need new images, new stories, new perceptions. To meet this need, D-MAP emphasizes the “alliance” in our name. We work with the media to bring our community into the light, with realism, respect, and thoroughness. We want to be bystanders and incidental characters, people in the street, people with opinions, crusaders and villains and just folks.


The cross-disability rights movement in the US emerged in the early 1970s, was jumpstarted during the 1977 Section 504 sit-ins, and rocketed into a degree of political power with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

We’ve come a long way and can be proud of nearly 40 years of advances in disability civil rights law and policy. But we still have not achieved full community inclusion. We must blast away old stereotypes, assuage fears, correct misinformation, become more visible. In other words, the hardest part lies ahead—changing hearts and minds.

We begin with a focus on news coverage. Disability rights and journalism cross paths every time a disability issue comes up and is reported and every time a person with a disability finds herself in the news. Yet despite valiant attempts by the National Center on Disability & Journalism and the Center for an Accessible Society, the disability community has not yet succeeded in engaging fully with journalists and the news industry.

That is what D-MAP hopes to do: to work with, support, and promote discerning, educated, informed news coverage of people with disabilities and the issues that affect us.