Why disability representation in the media is inefficient to challenging those ‘Attitudes.’

What is the definition of describing prejudice or hatred targeted to people who identify as having a disability or impairment? What is the image we imagine is portrayed on mainstream media?

Deconstruction in anti-social attitudes and poor communication skills recoil where disabled people face neverending problems throughout society, institutions and families. Attitude TV which will conclude its first run on ABC Television Australia next Saturday is a New Zealand imported series that features disabilities as a challenge on societal preconceptions and ableist oppressive language. Authenticity of disability on television, radio and/or film is not noticeable as executives, directors, scriptwriters or actors who have no acquired or permanent disability don’t find commercial interest to that type of alternative programming. 

Attitude Foundation Australia is our own equivalent organisation that ascribes to what Attitude Pictures in New Zealand works in overcoming how disability gets portrayed to the general audience who are not disabled or don’t have sensory impairments and chronic illnesses. ABC iView currently airs this series online. They are available to watch every three weeks per episode. Through Attitude Foundation Australia’s intercontinental partnership with its New Zealand counterpart, twenty-six documentaries will be produced for national broadcasting on the ABC. As Attitude Foundation Australia chairperson and former Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes explains: 

“As a person with disability and having been the Disability Discrimination Commissioner for eight and a half years, I know the importance of telling compelling stories about disability when engaging with the community.”

I have watched four episodes of this series. Conclusively disability was focused on that primitive instinct that each person who was profiled had overt emotions, minimal expressions and affinities that is not resident to able bodied people who wouldn’t had endure society’s cruelty at the physical differences, bullying and demotion of social participation. When writing on my blog, it is about three facets which form my identity. I’m high functionally autistic, have blended Sicilian, European and Australian heritage and live openly as a homosexual man. 

When disability perturbs what should’ve been told in a realistic depiction, a threat of abnormality is told to audiences who would otherwise had never seen disabled people on their television screens. The medical and scientific interventions to investigate causes or symptoms of Autism, devalues what society can really benefit from those born with this condition.           

Distinctive anomalies and the ableist oppressive language dominant in Attitude Pictures’ mission statement or its NZ equivalently produced documentaries, complies a disturbing trend of moralising parents of the disabled participants of this program. The second last instalment of Attitude TV, broadcasted on ABC TV on February 1^st, 2015 was called ‘Unlocking Autism.’ This chapter of the seven part sampler of this series told about two families whose children are on the severe scale of the spectrum. 

Degradation, insensitivity and arrogance ruined what might have assisted in changing prejudicial-manufactured mindsets to what autistic men, women and children were capable of. For the twenty eight minutes that this episode aired, not a single autistic adult appeared or narrated an alternative insight from medicalization. One of the mothers who partook told audiences about her turmoil at looking after her son, who is severely autistic. Before diagnosis, she had no prior information about the spectrum nor knew anyone close to her who was autistic. 

As a neurologist, immediately peril devoured logic. Claude Wylie is not your typical child. He is under ten years of age but behaves as if he is two or three. He wonders around at home in his underwear as his parents treat him as a nonverbal, animal-like spectacle. The underlying antitheses as you watch Claude and Jessica Monks who was another autistic child shown in this episode, is sorrow, humiliation and trauma. Nothing about pro-autistic inclusion and progression resonates. Instead Claude’s mum and Jessica’s parents denounce Claude and Jessica’s right for privacy and dignity and act desperate in sounding moralistic. Searching for a cure or ‘magic pill’ to take their child’s suffering away is very fluent, gullible and cruel to listen to especially when I was bullied for my ‘abnormality’ at school and at home.     

University of Auckland, along with a medically-led, non-profit organisation called Minds for Minds are negligent in professing an agenda to ‘cure’ us. They described their ethos as facilitating scientific research on Autism Spectrum Disorder ‘to make sense of the world that (sic) is very hard … throughout (sic) life it never seems to get any easier.’ While they insist the organisation has people from the autism community sitting on its board, what Attitude TV had failed to realise was that these scientists and microbiologists dismiss the concept of Autism self-advocacy and disability political communication. Or to cynically confess is that no person on the spectrum has managerial involvement with the organisation.      

Rigorous criticisms soon consumed Facebook and Twitter with prominent Australian disability advocates such as Craig Wallace, Samantha Connor, Carly Findlay and myself opposed to Attitude Foundation Australia’s future expectations in commissioning a series as prejudicially suggestive in its execution as what was carelessly done in this episode. Tanya Black, who is Attitude Pictures’ associate producer and head of content, read those tweets that were written and in an editorial tried to reach to those from the other side of the Tasman Sea. After talking to her extensively on Twitter and watching other episodes that encapsulated the late Stella Young’s vision in disability orientated content, I gave Tanya the benefit of the doubt. Although this won’t silence Australian audiences in clarifying what format our localised adaptation of Attitude TV in filming, producing and editing stories will resonant if using the social model criteria.

Australian based current affairs, documentary and news programs Australian Story, The Project and Sunday Night have a reputation of internationally acclaimed journalism. Including too showcasing stories on people with disabilities and diversifying narrations that conceive what happens daily in their lives. Sadly that platform is regularly pinched by parenting groups who promote out dated therapies and intervention programs adamant in making autistic children and adults ‘normatively functional’ again.  

Perhaps Attitude Pictures and Attitude Foundation Australia do appreciate our voices, opinions and divisive contributions of reporting and advocating for better, truthful and dignified media portrayals of people with disabilities. Unfortunately ‘Unlocking Autism’ defaulted on the mission statement Attitude TV alleges to celebrate stories that diversify ordinary people with disabilities:

“But for us it always comes back to story. We provide strong character driven content, of ordinary people living extraordinary lives. It all starts here.”

Sadly in this case it wasn’t!

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