 Sponsored in part by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering neighbors with disabilities to be at home in the community. Additional support for Abledon Arnair is sponsored in part by Washington County Mental Health Services, where hope and support come together. Welcome to this edition of Abledon Arnair, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns, and achievements of the different Ables. I've always been your host, Lauren Seiler. Arlene is off today. For this program today, we focus on etiquette and journalism and the importance of etiquette and journalism, do's and don'ts. With us to discuss this important topic is Christine Gilger, Dean of Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, part of the Arizona State University School of Journalism. Welcome to Abledon Arnair, Kristen. Thanks. It's Associate Dean, but... Associate Dean, I apologize. Okay, thank you so much. So can you tell me the missions and goals of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and the importance of the National Center for Disabilities and Journalism? Yeah, I'd be happy to talk about it. So the National Center on Disability and Journalism, as we've referred to it, the NCDJ, has been located at the Cronkite School here at ASU for about 10 years now. And it started out just very small. Group of volunteers, a graduate assistant, and me. And we have built it up, I think, pretty substantially over the last decade to the point now where we're doing a lot of training around the country for journalists and communicators of all kinds on how to make some difficult choices sometimes in terms of language, how to approach and decide on what disability coverage you're going to do. And we also sponsor a national, really an international contest each year that recognizes the best in disability reporting around the country. And so we feel like our job is not to be an advocate particularly, but to try to educate and work with journalists and communicators to help them do a better job in covering disabilities and also just making it easier for them by giving them some guidance and resources. So historically, well, besides being a journalist, I'm also an advocate, but historically they took out words, or the medical community took out words that were not necessarily used anymore, like the all-word, the word retarded, and some other medical jargon that is not really used anymore. How important is etiquette and journalism? Because this topic today can not only be used for journalists, but also people that work in the field of special needs like social workers. How important is etiquette when you're talking to someone using person-first language? Good question. I think that all of us, whether we're just talking to someone as an individual or if we're trying to reach out to an audience of some kind, it's important that you know who your audience is or who the person is that you're speaking to and that you speak to them with respect and understanding. And that's important from a journalistic perspective. It's really important because you want to be inclusive in your coverage. There are, I mean, one out of 20 people in this country have some kind of disability and think about all the people who know those people. I mean, it's not an insignificant number. So just from sort of a journalistic understanding and reaching your audience and reflecting your community, these are really important issues. As far as what you do, can you explain the dos and don'ts of special needs or disability reporting when you're interviewing somebody? Can you go through some of that? Yeah, I mean, it's a broad area. We try very hard not to be too prescriptive. What we're trying to do is provide some help and guidance. So, for example, you know, we tell people, you know, there are choices here. And here are just some things to think about when you make those choices. So, for example, you know, how and when do you refer to a disability at all if you're a journalist or a communicator and you're you're writing something or producing something? That's that's a big question. And we tell people, you know, also, also jumping in. Yeah, how so is that? Can there be a problem? Also, you know, how do you deal with that? What we try to buy people is to refer to a disability when it's relevant. And when the diagnosis comes from a reputable source, such as, you know, a medical professional or a licensed professional, you could run into trouble if you, you know, if if you're relying on information about that's really a medical diagnosis and there isn't one, you can't assume that you know what the medical diagnosis is. That's a journalistic question of accuracy and referring to it when it's relevant. Well, one good example, I think is, you know, if you're writing a story about, you know, say residents complaining about noisy airplanes flying over their houses and you interview someone who is a resident in the area who uses a wheelchair, is it relevant to say that person uses a wheelchair in that story? And the answer to that, obviously, is probably not, because using the wheelchair has nothing to do with, you know, how irritated you might be about noisy airplanes. Another example, I'm sure you remember this story. Well, I'm originally from New York before I moved to Vermont. And Gerardo Rivera did a story years ago, back in the 1970s about Willowbrook State School, you know, and the problems with institutionalizing people with special needs. Many oftentimes people in that particular institution were misdiagnosed. So, you know, misdiagnosed with retardation or something else. And then Gerardo Rivera, along with other legislators, got that place closed because it was a problem, you know, institutionalizing people. But many oftentimes, now, the problem that I've run to as a journalist, other journalists, either when they're starting out or they have problems in their reads, scripts, they put the person suffers from. Yeah. Yeah, that's another of the language issues that we address. And we strongly discourage saying suffering from, because you don't know if that person's suffering and they may very well not be. So it's a it's a very judgmental term that we recommend not using. Yeah, because I see I deal with, I deal with cerebral palsy. I deal with it, but I just keep going. You can't assume that someone has an issue without talking to the person. You know, the person has rights. So it's person first language. As far as, OK, so now Cronkite School as a whole, explain, you know, the journalism program a little bit about the students and Cronkite news and that type of thing. And, you know, so can you explain a little bit about what Cronkite School does and how it trains its students? Yeah, sure. So we're a pretty large journalism program and one of the best recognized in the country. We have about 1700 students and we have programs undergraduate and graduate programs. We're different from a lot of other journalism schools in that we really use what we call a teaching hospital model of education, which translated means it's very hands-on. Yeah, we have we have students from their second semester, freshman year, 40. And so it that's a very strong emphasis of ours. And we have something like 15 different professional programs now, where usually in their last semester, students are, you know, working for the week under the direction of a professional from journalism, whether they're working, they're working with a news director. They're working with all the managers within journalism to put stories together. Yeah, absolutely. We do a nightly newscast. I've seen Cronkite news. Yeah, I had gotten my training from from Lehman College in the Bronx. And but, you know, the journalism program there and the person who trained me was J. J. Gonzales from Channel Two News. So he was my yeah, he was my professor. And just with my journalism, disability goes out the window. If you have a challenge, you know, one of the things, you know, don't let that challenge get the best of you. And that when you're interviewing somebody, and I'm sure you can agree, you know, if the disability goes out the window, the person first. Um, so can you tell me, all right. So the pro the projects, what are some of the projects that the National Association for Disability and Journalism is doing now or has done in the past? Yeah, I mentioned a little bit about our our international, national journalism contest recognizing disability reporting. So that's really important because, you know, if we can share and call attention to great reporting, that encourages more great reporting. And, you know, journalists sort of like contests and they like, you know, some prize money. So we think that's important. And then we also have our disability length style language guide, which we've been talking about a little bit. That's probably the most used thing on our website. And we have just translated the guide into Spanish. Be posted and distributed soon. So we get lots of people who come to us sort of, you know, for advice and ideas on how they should handle language issues. And there are a lot of them and language changes quickly. So this is complicated. And, you know, journalists and communicators use the Associated Press style book, have more than 100 terms and words in our style book. And, you know, only about 15, 20% of those are even mentioned in the AP style book. So there's not a lot of guidance and direction out there. So I, as I'm looking at your website now, while we're on there, explain a little bit more about the language and style guide. And why is it so important? You know, as far as language, you said language changes. Well, of course it changes on a daily basis. So can you explain a little bit more about that? Yeah, I mean, language is, you know, evolving all the time. And there are new phrases and words that crop up. I mean, an example might be, you know, able-bodied. And there's some discussion about, you know, there are people who say that that is not a good term to use because it implies that people with disabilities lack able-bodied. Others prefer, they may prefer, you know, non-disabled or enabled with being more accurate. And so we recommend for, in that example, using non-disabled or does not have a disability or is not living with a disability as more neutral choices. But sometimes journalists are going to use able-bodied, like if it's at a government report, for example. You know, handicapped parking is another example of that. When we're not saying, you know, absolutely banned, this word is banned, it's the context that you're using it in, and trying to be as inclusive and as accurate as you could possibly be. You know, there are other words that have gone out of use. You know, you mentioned the R word. Abnormal has gone out of use. There are a lot of these, you know, afflicted with or stricken with or suffering from or victim of. You know, those are words that have generally, and for good reason, gone out of use. Well, if they've gone out of use, why is it that some journalists, maybe, is it because they don't know that it's gone out of use, like suffering from? Why is it that some people still use it? Yeah, you still do see it, although I have to say that I see it less than I used to. Another example is, you know, confined to a wheelchair. I still see these kinds of words and terms, but I actually, it's less than it used to be. I do think this is a process of education, and it takes time, and I think we're starting to get there. Talk about, I noticed on your website, it says here that the, you know, because a lot of corporations help you guys out. It says that the Ford Foundation produced a video on disability inclusion. It's important for inclusion in people, especially all across the board. Can you explain a little bit about that? Because this is about Judy Heumann. She was, she was an advocate, but go ahead. Yeah, she's a fellow at the Ford Foundation, and she's talking about, in this short video, well done video about the work of the Ford Foundation with regard to disability. That the foundation has been very active in the last just couple of years. It's an interesting story because, you know, the Ford Foundation had been making lots of grants for all kinds of things, and disability really wasn't, you know, in their minds until they got some complaints from the disability community, and it kind of woke them up. And they now are very intentional about supporting work and disability and incorporating, you know, disability into all of their grant programs. So they have been a big supporter of us. We got a grant from them last year, which has supporting the NCDJ operations, and it's made a huge difference to us. But what you're referring to is what we call our news feed. So one of the things we try to do on our website is to share news about disability. Yeah, which is important to get the message out there. And I noticed that Cronkite News several times, I've seen other, some of your student reporters do stories about people with special needs as well. Yeah. And can you explain some of that and some of that and how you guys are working towards, you know, with inclusion, because I'm sure that there are students with special needs within Cronkite School that wanna be journalists. So can you explain some of that as well? You know, as educators in this area, we think it's important that we teach our own students about how to be inclusive. And that is, so we've built a number of things into our curriculum. For example, in our multimedia journalism class where students are learning how to set up websites, they learn the very basic and not very difficult ways to try to make their websites accessible. If, you know, captioning on videos is another example. And then in our editing classes, we have students do exercises on disability language and sort of edit things for, you know, like confined to a wheelchair and they have to spot that in a story and say, ah, you know, that's not really what we should be doing. And they use our style guide for that. And we have a quiz that anybody can take on the site and you get a little certificate at the end if you do well on the language quiz. And then Cronkite News, you mentioned. So we feel like if we've introduced diversity and disability throughout the curriculum, by the time students get to Cronkite News, which is usually as I said in their senior year, sometimes a little bit earlier, we have, you know, sort of an understanding and awareness of disability as a topic for coverage. And frankly, you know, it's an undercover topic. There are tons of really good stories that need to be told about disability issues and people with disabilities. Now, there's another project, well, besides Cronkite News, I've noticed in the ASU journalism that there's News 21, is that part of you guys or is that separate from? For the Cronkite School, it's at one of our graduate programs? National programs, yeah, that I mentioned. So this program, we bring together top journalism students from around the country with our students. Yes, ma'am. They're journalism students and they do really deep dive reporting on a different topic each year. So we've covered things like voting rights, veterans, services to veterans, why? Yeah, I saw one with, and it was, I don't know if it was an older version, but I saw one where, I watched the whole entire thing about water conservation and bad water, good water. That's, yeah. And the most recent one we did this past year was on hate in America, hate crimes. Yes, ma'am. Yeah. So those are projects that we display, of course, on a website, but also share with media partners around the country. So for example, USA Today ran one of the, a couple of, actually, the hate in America stories. So we distribute that widely. We have a little bit more time left, but what are your future goals with the National Center on Disability and Journalism as a whole as far as inclusion for people with special needs? Yeah, that's a good question. We really want to provide more training. So sometimes that'll be in-person training. We just did one with a group of Arizona State employees. People who do websites and who do communications for the state of Arizona, and just spent a day with them, starting with a panel of people who live with disabilities talking about media coverage, and sort of their pet peeves and what they hope for. And then going through the style guide, we talked a lot about story choices and how to try to avoid what is commonly referred to as disability porn stories. Disability what? Disability porn. Pornography? Wait, I'm confused. Yeah, have you heard that term? No, I have not. What exactly is that? I've never heard that before. Talked about, and journalists worry about this. So it's the kind of story, okay, think about the story that you might have read or seen on television about a student who lives with a disability who gets invited to the prom. Okay. Or, you know, the- Do you find, do you see that as a bad thing? Well, there's an interesting discussion about this. I mean, on the negative side, people within the disability community tell us frequently that, you know, they don't want to be, you know, they're not, they don't exist to inspire other people. I see, I see where you're going with this. Yeah, so it's exploitive in a way. And then the other part of the conversation that we also hear from people is that, you know, well, I would rather have some of those stories than be ignored altogether. So what we try to do is to talk to journalists about, you know, you know, think about the reason why you're doing this story and try to mainstream, which is another sort of journalistic term, people with disabilities into your coverage, so that you're not just talking to somebody with a disability as a, you know, some iconic example of something, but you know, you're doing any kind of story and you want to include the voices of people with disability. So yeah, for example, years ago, I'm talking about like 70s and 80s, I was, I was put in a special education for a couple of classes and then got mainstream. Mainstream people with special needs put them into inclusion classes and make them part of society. Don't segregate them. Is that the same thing as this? Yes, it's the same idea, exactly. Yeah. Okay, so, is there anything else you would like to talk about the National, the National Institute of Journalism and Disability before we end? Well, I would just encourage people to go check out our website, it's at ncdj.org. And, you know, we have a lot of resources there for anybody and our resource, the language style guide is there and we'll soon have the Spanish language version of that guide posted. When will that? It should be in the next few days. Okay, thank you so much. I would like to thank Kristin Gilger of the National, National Institute, a National Center on Disability and Journalism part of the Arizona State University. She's an associate dean there. Thank you so much for being part of Ableton on Air. This puts an end to this edition of Ableton on Air. Thank you so much. And this puts an end to this edition of Ableton on Air. I'm Lauren Seiler. See you next time. Ableton on Air is sponsored in part by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering neighbors with disabilities to be at home in the community. Additional support for Ableton on Air is sponsored in part by Washington County Mental Health Services where hope and support come together.