In late February of this year, the disability community on Twitter exploded with outrage over an episode of NPR’s audio show Invisibilia called “The Fifth Vital Sign.” The episode explained a type of chronic pain therapy called “intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment,” in which patients — children, in this case — are deliberately exposed to pain in an effort to teach their brains to ignore it.
The Mighty collected some of the Twitter responses from people with chronic pain here. Some said the treatments sounded like gaslighting, torture or abuse. Others placed it in the historical context of minimizing women’s pain. At least two claimed to be former patients of the doctors in the story. None of these perspectives were heard in the story.
The Society for Pediatric Pain Medicine released an official response to the episode, part of which reads:
This type of oversimplification completely ignores and negates decades of intense scientific work that has gone into understanding the complex neurobiology of pain, or its transmission, modulation and treatments. … The Podcast fails miserably to convey to its listeners, the scientific evidence behind the rationale and impact of a program for treatment of complex chronic pain associated with significant disability.
From SPPM’s response to NPR’s Invisibilia podcast, “The Fifth Vital Sign”
Reading through the responses, I kept thinking one thing: We need more disabled people in newsrooms. No one who lives with chronic pain would have settled for the “gee whiz, isn’t that neat” angle the podcast adopted. They would never have told that story without seeking out people who have had their pain dismissed by doctors, who have been told to suck it up by parents or who have struggled to ignore their pain in order to get through the day. They would have found experts who could have put the dismissal of the pain of women and girls into historical context and pointed out the danger of claiming the girls are in pain partly because, “they’re not in touch with their feelings” and “they don’t have the sophisticated emotional skills they need to manage in an increasingly stressful world.”
Abled people have far too many things we don’t see in our writing. We miss crucial aspects to the framing of a story. We write “inspirational” stories that devalue our subjects. We use ableist phrasing. And we may not even realize who we should be speaking to and the questions we should be asking.
In other words, disability is a facet of diversity. But as far as I can tell, the industry rarely considers it in diversity discussions.
Did you know many wheelchair users find the phrase “wheelchair bound” insulting because they consider their chairs to be mobility enhancing? Or have you ever read a story that framed accessibility requirements imposed under the Americans with Disabilities Act as nothing more than a legal hurdle?
The CDC says “1 in 4 adults have a disability that impacts major life activities.” That’s a quarter of our readership, which means our newsrooms should hire enough disabled reporters to make up a full quarter of employees.
Newsrooms should reflect the communities they cover, but in my view many of the supposedly necessary qualifications for the job — or the entrenched culture that values those qualifications above all others — lock disabled people out.
Consider this exchange that happened in my newsroom recently:
Graphic designer: I admire you reporters for going out on the hottest day of the year to report. I get really bad headaches from the heat.
Editor: You know what I would have said to that if you were a reporter? Get out there anyway.
Imagine being a reporter with a disability in that culture, common across the industry. You can’t bring up any personal limitations because it would be shameful. It might even get you fired. You wonder if it would have kept you from being hired in the first place.
And because of your disability, you’ve probably spent your life being made to feel bad about all the ways you inconvenience others, making you especially sensitive to these kinds of cues.
Someone with Crohn’s might need to take a day/week/month off for a flare-up. An autistic person might be totally overwhelmed after covering a big event. A reporter with EDS might become exhausted doing person-on-the-street reporting. Or maybe someone just gets bad headaches in the heat.
But those people can still be valuable reporters. Mx. Crohn’s might be the best reporter on the team when they are able to work. Mx. Autism may be overwhelmed by big events but do amazing one-on-one interviews; or even be amazing at big events, but just need a break afterward. Mx. EDS could be the best researcher the organization has, right from their desk. And Mx. Headache? They might do excellent street reporting in any other type of weather, or do great desk interviews or editing or research.
And all these people would bring important perspectives to news writing that are missing. Reporters pride ourselves about giving voice to the voiceless and putting spotlights on what is ignored. But so often we miss the mark with the disabled community.
Do we need anytime/anywhere reporters with great physical and mental stamina? Absolutely. Those rock star reporters deserve plenty of accolades. But the culture I’ve seen thus far so devalues anyone who can’t be that kind of a reporter that I don’t imagine anyone disabled would feel safe in it.
Ironically, the editor who made the “get out there” comment acted with empathy when faced with exactly that situation. A reporter I know needed a break from the heat specifically because of migraines, and the editor was completely supportive of the reporter going home to recover.
But that doesn’t prove there isn’t a problem; quite the opposite. The editor made the comment in the newsroom because the mindset is deeply entrenched in the culture. And the reporter who needed the break felt terrible about it, even though they knew it was something completely outside their control. They felt like they let down the team.
Because ableism is so deeply entrenched in our society, let me be clear: the reporter did not let down the team. In movies, the hero can always overcome a physical limitation to save the day when it’s important enough. That’s not how real, live, human bodies work. In fact, listening to our bodies leads to better productivity in the long run because we don’t get as sick, don’t burn out and do feel more supported overall.
We shouldn’t feel bad when our bodies let us down, and the news industry should work to change a culture that doesn’t understand that and thereby excludes disabled reporters.
NPR apologized on Twitter and wrote an editorial response to address the issues brought up by the disability community, but neither were particularly well received. To me, it seemed they still completely missed the point of the criticism — and that’s exactly my point.
More important than my opinions on disability in newsrooms are the voices of disabled journalists themselves. Please check out these pieces by disabled reporters:
- “Obstacles and Opportunities for Journalists with Disabilities,” by Michelle Hackman — “A blind journalist on overcoming the latent prejudices that keep people with disabilities out of newsrooms.”
- “Melbourne Press Club — Where’s your anti-discrimination policy?” by Claudia Forsberg — “It’s not me who needs to change her career. It’s this profession that needs to make room for me.”
- “The Politics of Exclusion,” by Stella Young — “Being asked to respond to Alan Jones’s comment that ‘women are destroying the joint’, Stella Young reflected on how hard it is for women with disabilities to get in ‘the joint’ in the first place.”
In the interests of transparency, I feel it necessary to disclose that I was recently diagnosed as being autistic with ADHD. My interest in disability issues began in earnest about a year ago, well before my neurodiverity diagnosis. I wrote the bulk of this article before that diagnosis, which is why I refer to myself in the post as an “abled” person.