The Disability Beat

Placing disability at the center of reporting

When I asked Bacita De La Rosa how high the water reached inside her house during 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan, she placed her hands just above her waist.

She told me she thought she would drown, alone, on the ground floor of her home that overlooked Tacloban’s bay. Her family was sheltering upstairs, but she was seated in her wheelchair as the sea rose around her.

Bacita De La Rosa and her family in Tacloban in 2018. (Photo by Jason Strother)

(Image description: A gray haired Southeast Asian woman sits in a wheelchair in front of several smiling men, women, and children)

I conducted that interview five years after the superstorm devastated the coastal Philippine city. It was perhaps the first on-the-ground dispatch in U.S. media that looked at the intersection of disability and climate change. But for me, that reporting trip was the start of a career pivot.

Since then, I’ve made covering disability and accessibility my primary beat. And while I’d love to assign only my stories to my Montclair State University students, I share with them the work of other journalists whose reporting has revealed the unseen or often ignored concerns that impact the disability community.

One of those reports is Dan Barry’s 2014 New York Times feature The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse and the accompanying short film The Men of Atalissa.

Earlier this semester, my students learned about Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 exposé on the Willowbrook State School, which showed the appalling conditions that disabled residents were forced to live in. For my class, Barrry’s story is a reminder that this kind of treatment is not just a thing of the past—and how even well-meaning townsfolk can also be complicit.

My students are also drawn to Amanda Morris, Caitlin Gilbert, and Jacqueline Alemany’s story Some disabled workers in the U.S. make pennies per hour. It’s legal. The story was published in The Washington Post last year and won first place in the Katherine Schneider Excellence in Disability Reporting awards in the large market category.

Morris was the Post’s disability reporter. Her departure earlier this year from the paper makes the number of outlets with this dedicated beat even smaller than it already was.

Some other journalists who mainly focus on disability that I follow include:

• Julia Métraux at Mother Jones

• Gene Myers, who reports for the USA Today Network in New Jersey

• Sara Luterman, a reporter at The 19th

This is not an exhaustive list, but the number of disability reporters out there is probably not much bigger.

Introduce me to some of the reporters you follow. Get in touch by replying to this newsletter.