Disability is not Inability

:: Access at whatever cost.

The media has been the official face of social discrimination against the disability community. They will reinforce social values that entrench discrimination. This is common in advertising, TV, and film. It is also seen in words used in the print media. The media exploits various loopholes in the system to hide, exclude, discriminate and perpetuate the status quo. The disability communities are themselves stand accused of connivance.

In the developing world, value is given to access on an as is basis. Organisations of persons with disabilities still fight to see more inclusion in the media at whatever cost. They seem not to care nor have any control over discriminating impact aspects of various media products. Most media however, prefer to shun disability altogether after finding it too politicised without firm principles of engagement. The public media in Kenya has shamefully failed the disability community.

In Kenya for example, the leading daily newspapers have continually written stories on person with hearing impairment using words like "deaf and dumb" without rising eyebrows. Actually the Disability ACT in Kenya is silent on the role the media plays in perpetuating social discrimination of the persons with disabilities.

Exclusion is more comfortable for many editors, advert and film producers who do not see the market value of disability community. They are poor and without much economic power, their umbrella organisations are not strong enough to articulate such issues. In South Africa where disability movement is said to be most advanced in Africa, media will name a person on a wheelchair of with physical disability "invalid" with ease of print.

In Ghana a deaf man who for the first time in the history of Ghanian independence education finished a course in a polytechnic did not make news. The Mobil advert used a hand sign, which means 'yes' in sign language. It hoped to encourage people to fill gas at Mobil stations and help educate a child with disabilities.

Theories about imagery the media uses or should use are awash in the North and South alike. Some people (including leaders with disability) thought Mobil was misusing disability for its own gain. But in the South where pictures of persons with disabilities are only allowed on national TV if sympathy is being sought from the viewers for charity purposes or is "mordernised".

In the developed economies, they have started arguing with the role persons with disability are given in movies, peradventure they perpetuate discrimination. Tanzanian local movie industry already has a movie expressing the discrimination of a lover with disability who has a relationship with a woman without disability.

The disability communities in both developed and developing countries still differ on how the media should express them. Depending on the levels of education, levels of legal awareness, levels of media relations, levels of economic status in the countries they live, the strength of their national organisations etc.

There is still a major contention whether persons with disabilities should only be portrayed as the needy members of community therefore in need of resources and must thus present in the media sympathy perpetuating imagery. The strong fundraising organisations and those working with persons with disabilities in say the UK or many developing countries have perfected this media theme.

:: media perpetuating discrimination.

:: access at whatever cost.

:: disability engaging the media

:: disability and media regulation




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