Disability is not Inability

:: UNDP official shares views on the media and disability.

Margie Cook of ther UNDP during the workshop on electrol process and disability 2007 kenya civic education programme shared some concerns about disability relations with the media.

She agreed that getting the media to hear what PWDs have to say is a challenge as one had to buy time. She asked participants to make their organisations interesting and to acquire media skills so that the newsrooms would be interested in having the news.

She elaborated on how to do this citing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs experienced by all human beings and how the same model could be applied to the media in terms of a Hierarchy of News Value. In order to get the media to make PWD issues front page stories there was need to get the common ground between news and these issues by telling human interest stories about real people, not issues and theories.

DPOs should tap into people’s emotions in order to bring forth issues, this way they might even end up embarrassing institutions and the government into implementing their issues

She also noted that careless language impacted negatively on PWDs’ self esteem. The Media Council of Kenya is a self regulatory body of the media industry; therefore DPOs should forward complaints on breaches of conduct and unfair reporting. On the same note, KNCHR has the mandate to hear complaints on breaches on human rights e.g. if Kenya is breaching conventions it has signed and ratified.

Margie concluded that this had been a useful opportunity to engage with the Media Focus on Africa as they will be doing a lot of work for the elections. She promised more engagements of the same nature.

:: Recommendations from the Media Session

:: The workshop presentations

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