Media Issues with Disabled Sports

This past week was the first time since the start of this semester that I had ever seen a Paralympic post on social media. Before learning about the Paralympics in this class, I had never even heard the word before.

  For me, it was an exciting moment to finally see people in the disabled community being represented on social media. It was almost as exciting as the time my sister was featured on the Nasdaq screen in Times Square.

Having these two experiences and now the prompt of media issues with disabled sports made me realize that there should be an increase in media coverage for the Paralympics as well as other disabled sports, but this raises the question: How? 

Media coverage for people with disabilities in general has been rather small. In the white paper published by the Fords Foundation “Road Map for Inclusion: Changing the Face of Disability in Media,” there was one particular quote that stuck out to me. Judith Huemann writes, 

“It is no longer acceptable to not have women at the table. It is no longer acceptable to not have people of color at the table. But no one thinks to see if the table is accessible.” 

The media has begun to add more inclusion with characters and movies, such as Black Panther and the Little Mermaid, yet there is still little coverage of people with disabilities. 

According to an Anneberg study on the top 100 gross movies in 2016, nearly half of the movies did not have a single character with a disability. Of the characters that did have a disability in the top 100, there were only 2.7% of characters with a disability, and 2.5% characters who were depicted having a disability in the past ten years. Having few representations of people with disabilities in the media seems to reflect the media coverage for disabled sports. 

In order to increase the media coverage for disabled sports and the Paralympics, I believe that leaders and position holders at the International Paralympic Committee could reach out to other organizations that create social media content. By creating a relationship with other organizations that have a larger media following could increase the media coverage as well as awareness of disabled sports. 

An example of a relationship that may increase the media coverage for disabled sports could be to pair with Nike and have them sponsor the athletes that compete in these events. Other athletes that are sponsored by Nike have shoes, clothes, and commercials which they are featured in. By partnering with other sports related companies, I think that the media coverage would increase. I also believe that the awareness of disabled sports would benefit. Partnering with these organizations could also be done with multiple athletes. If athletes from other leagues, such as the NBA or even other Olympians, would increase the coverage and the inclusivity of all athletes. 

The media coverage that athletes with disabilities do get is sometimes detrimental to creating a bigger platform in the media. For example, athletes with disabilities are often portrayed as “villains” or “supercrips.” Having these labels attached to athletes with disabilities decreases the media coverage. I believe that partnering with other sports organizations would also fix this issue. Having more examples of all kinds of athletes being together in an ad or commercial would increase the positivity and help eliminate the negative words associated with athletes with disabilities. Creating one large community for all athletes would also create more equality between all athletes.