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This study examines disability terminology to explore how the news media frame cultural representations of the disability community. More specifically, the paper examines the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act on journalist's language choices about disability topics. A content analysis of news stories using disability terms in The Washington Post and The New York Times during the past decade was conducted. The paper illustrates that disability community identity continues to be formed, transformed and maintained through news media presentations of disability terminology. The paper argues that the US Disability Rights Movement had some success during the 1990s in putting forth language that advances its aims, though the study also suggests that some journalists continue to use terms that perpetuate limiting, narrow stereotypes about people with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the March 1, 2000, issue of the "Disability & Society." From this issue onwards, the executive editors are delighted to include a new innovation which they have called "Student Perspectives."

This article examines how mental health service users/consumers, advocates, professionals and researchers interpret and theorise the impacts of mental health news. It focuses on the following themes: Creating fears about mental illness by focusing on criminal and violent acts; Reinforcing power imbalances by privileging biomedical issues and sources; and Sanitising mental health issues through the selective use of personal narratives. The study draws upon the concept of biocommunicability, which casts light on the performative power of health news in reinforcing ideas and expectations about the appropriate role for different actors to adopt in relation to health knowledge. Previous research on health news has identified biomedical authority, patient-consumer and public sphere as three predominant models of biocommunicability and this article examines how these are bound up with criticisms of mental health news. The findings are related to the 'mediatisation of psychiatric culture' as one of extremes and perspectives from Mad Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview-based study explores the stories behind current disability-based journalism based on the intersubjective experiences of five Toronto journalists whose lives and work intersect with disability. These discussions are divided into salient categories of attitudes, representation, language, framing, gate-keeping, and communication, followed by a list of recommendations on how to pitch disability-based stories to news media. This study uses a dual lens of disability theory and journalism to open a discussion toward further areas of consideration of this apparent gap between journalists and disability-invested organizations/individuals, and to communicate strategies for researchers, allies, and journalists who seek to learn more about how cultural representations of journalism come to exist as they do. Ultimately, participants encourage a shift from dialogue about disability and journalism to a realization that this dialogue is far from oppositional and players in both fields wish to contribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]