They say portrayal of the movie’s hero is ‘inaccurate but uplifting’

From ABC News:

People with spinal cord injuries praised Avatar for its portrayal of a hero who uses a wheelchair, saying the movie marks a welcome change from the way Hollywood most often shows paraplegics.

“I didn’t feel like ["Avatar"] was a pity story about someone in a wheelchair,” said Muha, a communications associate at the National Spinal Cord Injury Association and the current Ms. Wheelchair New Jersey.

In 2004, the top Academy Award went to Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood’s film about a female athlete who decides to die rather than live with paralysis.

Disability advocates said filmmaker James Cameron could have used some help making Avatar’s hero more realistic. Examples they cited: Cpl. Jake Sully, played by able-bodied Sam Worthington, didn’t use a seat cushion on his wheelchair, and seemed to labor too much when he got in and out of his wheelchair.

Earlier posts here.

Anybody looking for outdated disability language in the media found lots of examples in holiday coverage of James Cameron’s ‘Avatar.’ The futuristic movie fantasy’s main character is an injured Marine who uses a wheelchair.

Just for reference, the AP Stylebook offers the following guidance on describing people who use wheelchairs:

“People use wheelchairs for independent mobility. Do not use confined to a wheelchair or wheelchair-bound.”

(Source: 2009 AP Stylebook, edited by Darrell Christian, Sally Jacobsen and David Minthorn)

Following are a few samples:

Earlier post here.

Journalist Judy Woodruff jumps into the new PBS NewsHour blog, “The Rundown,” listing some topics she’s eager to talk about. Among her top five: Disability. An excerpt:

Our older son has serious physical disabilities that have opened our entire family’s eyes to the plight of those who wake up each day with the equivalent of a mountain to climb, simply to get ready for the day. As advanced as our nation is, we have a very long way to go to even the playing field, much less give them the opportunities they deserve, to be the contributing members of society they want to be. I am always on the lookout for stories and developments that relate to their lives.

Earlier posts here.

See also this 2004 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Woodruff’s husband, Al Hunt: More attention for disabilities.

(PBS NewsHour photo)

From the New Zealand Herald:

Special Olympics New Zealand is calling on the nation’s Broadcasting Standards Authority to deem the word “retard” unacceptable after television personality Paul Henry used the word to describe Scottish singer Susan Boyle in a broadcast.

… Henry laughed while reading from a magazine article about how the Britain’s Got Talent singer was starved of oxygen at birth and suffered an intellectual disability.

“Here’s the really interesting revelation: she is in fact retarded …

“And if you look at her carefully, you can make it out,” he said.

Special Olympics New Zealand chairman David Rutherford said using “retard” to describe intellectually disabled people was as hurtful as racial slurs like “nigger” and “kike”.

See also: Media critic says Henry’s jab was a publicity stunt — New Zealand Herald

” … the most worrying thing about TVNZ and Henry is their comments are not a slip of the tongue, but aimed at boosting his brand and appealing to the mean-spirited.”

From the [UK] Independent:

Jack Thorne, a co-writer for the BBC series “Cast Offs,” says his own experience inspired him to create a show that explodes a few myths about disability. Thorne has a condition called chronic cholinergic urticaria, which is basically an allergy to heat, and another co-writer, Alex Bulmer, is blind.

Thorne says the protagonist of the series, Dan (portrayed by Peter Mitchell, left), represents himself as he was adjusting to life as a man with disabilities. He says the show is about Dan being “born-again” as he is immersed in the world of disability and “discovers that not all disabled people are as introverted or full of self-hatred and pity as he.”

Dan’s coming-out story is all about that basic truth – a truth I learnt as he did: disabled people are just as annoying as non-disabled people.

… Disablism remains a big prejudice in modern society. Last year on Jay Leno’s primetime talk show, the President of the United States made a joke about disabled people which, if it had been about any other minority group, would have led to serious questioning of his ability to lead the country. Obama said that his performance at bowling was so bad “it was like the Special Olympics or something”. Disability, by Obama’s definition, was about difference and failure.

And TV buys into this prejudice; if it moved on from race discrimination in the 1970s, it’s not moved on from disabled discrimination yet.

Thorne says his show is a “filthy, funny, different TV show” that tries to shed the usual stereotypes of people with disabilities as quirky object of pity and rather portray them as authentic.

(Independent photo)

Earlier posts here and here.

See also:

• Cast Offs – Time to cast a new light on disability – [UK] Independent
• BBC casts deaf actress in lead role – [UK] Daily Mirror
• It’s okay to call me a spastic, says comic Laurence Clark — [UK] News & Star
• It’s OK, you’re allowed to laugh at Cast Offs – [UK] Times

From the San Francisco Chronicle (with video), New York Times, BBC:

Google has announced a plan to use speech recognition technology to automatically bring text captions to millions of YouTube videos, making them accessible to people with hearing impairments and making them more searchable.

Analysts expect the change to open the videos to a wider foreign market and potentially make them more profitable.

Engineer Ken Harrenstein, who helped develop the translation  system, said it was imperfect but “will continue to improve with time.” Harrenstein, who is deaf, said in a Google blog that the majority of user-generated content on Youtube has been inaccessible to “people like me.’

From Examiner.com:

This week’s episode of  the Fox series Glee, which chronicled a high school team’s effort to raise money for an accessible bus, ranked as the third most popular video on Hulu.com. The ‘Wheels’ episode explored questions about human diversity, and featured Kevin McHale’s character Artie Abrams, who uses a wheelchair on the show, and Lauren Potter (left) and Robin Trocki, two actresses with Down syndrome.

The full episode is available on Hulu.com here.

Writing on the New York Times Arts Beat blog, Mike Hale said he felt the show’s take on diversity delivered “a mixed message at best.” An excerpt:

Also problematic was the way Lauren Potter, a 19-year-old actress with Down syndrome, was used as a prop in the continuing humanization of [character] Sue Sylvester [played by Jane Lynch]. Forced by the principal to hold open auditions for the cheerleading squad, Sue chose Ms. Potter’s character, the cheerfully determined but not very skilled Becky Johnson… When the big reveal came, we discovered that Sue’s motives were pure: her own older sister has Down syndrome. This development is being praised throughout the Gleeverse, but the view from here is that it felt smarmy and artificial (and not artificial in a good way).

Entertainment Weekly’s Dan Snierson (on MSNBC.com) has a different view of Lynch’s tender scene with Trocki, in which Lynch’s character read “Little Red Riding Hood” to her older sister.

A little manipulative? Probably. But I didn’t care in that glorious moment.

Earlier posts here. and here.

(Photo from the Riverside [CA] Press-Enterprise).