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Ian Macrae

What is it with disabled people and the media? Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a national outpouring of pity – perhaps an unsurprising reaction to the death of a public figure’s son, though here the pity was as much for the dead disabled boy as the grieving parents – an outbreak of protectiveness towards a maligned disabled TV presenter, and that core of middle England, the Radio 4 audience voting Peter White, if not the funniest man in the nation, at least the Station’s top comedy dog. And all of this follows on the heels of Mikey Hughes’s Big Brother near victory and Verne Troyer’s similarly close shave with triumph on the Celeb version of the show.

All of which leaves those of us who’re involved in presenting disability in the media, and critiquing how others do it, grappling with something that’s between extreme puzzlement and deep frustration.

This is because, co-existent with these signs of spring, Jeremy Clarkson still gets away with defining Britain’s Prime Minister in terms of an impairment – had he referred to Barak Obama in terms similarly derogatory of his ethnicity Clarkson might well have received the same sort of bum’s rush which Carol Thatcher was correctly given for a similar error of judgement – and it’s still widely held to be appropriate for comics to hold out the begging bowl to viewers in the name of “helping disabled people”, and the press continues to be filled with stories of pluck and triumph over tragedy when they’re not moaning about “political correctness gone mad”.

In short, the relationship between disabled people and the media remains deeply confused. And of course, that’s because the society which the media represents and reflects back to itself, hasn’t sorted out its own attitudes towards us as individuals or as a community. And too often they’re more comfortable with their own views on us than ours.