Page 146 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

D sab l t es and the Med a | 1

advocacy organizations for disabilities can shape not only understanding about
disabilities and about persons with disabilities, but can also significantly influ-
ence the course of research and therefore of new developments and treatments
about a disability due to their fund-raising capacity.
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, persons with dis-
abilities began to advocate for themselves. In 1977, members of the disability
community participated in a four-week sit-in in the offices of San Francisco’s
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, to call for the enforcement of
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The protesters were successful
and Section 504 is regarded as a precursor to the Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA) of 1990. Advances in technology and in medical care have assisted
persons with disabilities in self-advocacy. The development of new technolo-
gies from motorized wheelchairs to computers and the Internet to augmenta-
tive communication devices has enabled persons with disabilities to have greater
mobility, to communicate more readily, and to more fully participate in their
communities. As a result, persons with disabilities are more and more seen; are
more and more visible, and seek more and more to represent themselves and
to (rightfully) be the authority about how they are represented. More and more
memoirs and other writings by persons with disabilities are now available, and
by persons whose communicative and cognitive impairment (i.e., those with
Down Syndrome) would in the past have been seen as making this impossible.
It is crucial that the persons who have the disability be in charge of their own
representation. Stereotypes about disabled persons as a “burden” and less than
normal are so deeply entrenched that people do not realize they are perpetuat-
ing discriminatory attitudes at the moment when they believe themselves to be
advocating for positive change. This is in no small part because, too often when
it comes to the media, those with disabilities are not in charge of the tools of the
media. An example of this is the autism advocacy efforts of talk radio host Don
Imus. Imus has been both praised for his speaking about autism on the air and
criticized. In his broadcasts, Imus presented one theory of autism causation that,
accordingly, offered a one-dimensional representation of autism: Imus spoke of
autism as being caused by vaccines and of autistic children as damaged and in-
jured. (Imus’s wife, Deirdre Imus, is herself an advocate for environmental causes
and has created her own line of environmentally friendly cleaning products.)
Due to the popularity of Imus’s talk show (until his ouster in April 2007 as a result
of his racist comments with regard to the Rutgers University women’s basketball
team), whatever he might say about autism, and about the causes of and poten-
tial treatments for autism—however one-sided and simply inaccurate—reached a
much broader audience and perpetuated misunderstanding of autistic persons.
The Internet has leveled the playing field in giving persons with disabilities
not only a voice but a constant presence. Via e-mail, chat rooms, and blogs, the
Internet has made it possible for persons with disabilities who might have diffi-
culties in physically transporting themselves to a meeting, a support group, or a
rally, to find each and to find support, and to band together to be a growing po-
litical presence. By putting up their own Web sites and other media publications,
disability advocates like Not Dead Yet have taken on more and more of a part