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chapter six milestones, mixed messages, and missed opportunities The Unfinished Business of the Disability Media You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse. —Caliban, in The Tempest W ith the mainstream press locked in an echo chamber of clueless sentimentality, and book publishers stuck in a rut of melodramatic memoirs, it is up to the specialized disability press to show the way. During the most promising period in the history of the disability media, those heady years of heightened public awareness and community spirit attending the passage of the ADA, it seemed as though the long-sought “literature of our own” was imminent. A brief efflorescence of new magazines, newspapers, radio and television shows, even a national cable network rode the coattails of the political victory. The grassroots campaign for the ADA had awakened an audience beyond people with disabilities and their caregivers to the presence of a potent if forgotten minority. The moment was ripe for entrepreneurial publishers and producers to fit content to consciousness. This emergence of specialized media companies paralleled other start-up operations—many of them involving fashion or home product design—serving the community. The paradigmatic success story in this sector is still Quickie, the Californiabased wheelchair company begun by a paraplegic, Mary Hamilton, to challenge the drab hospital supply giants (namely the “invalid care” monopoly of Everest and Jennings) with a lightweight, rainbow-hued product line that answered the needs for style and fun. “If you can’t stand up, stand out,” Hamilton’s tagline went. That was the mantra as well of the new disability press, which hit the newsstands with bright color, bold headlines, and attitude. As with Quickie, the premise of these start-ups was the revolutionary notion that people with disabilities could run their own for-profit companies that, by knowing their market better, could deliver a superior product and make a statement by succeeding. In the magazine business, this had happened before. Other civil rights movements had supported publications whose pages were filled with images that mirrored their readers’ own, and with stories that rang with the authenticity of firsthand experience as well as the urgency of the inside scoop on fresh issues that mattered, leading off the news instead of being buried at the back of a paper. This was the wining formula of Ms., Ebony, Jet, Black Enterprise, A, and Latina. A slew of gay publications used living with AIDS as the tip of their editorial spears, including POZ, which barely preceded the onslaught of disability publications. The business model is enticing: a modest investment in a small editorial staff willing to work for peanuts and the good of the cause who send the production and printing off-site could grow within a few years to a substantial subscriber base and multimillion-dollar ad revenue stream. Many “minority” publications had already been packaged and sold off to huge media concerns, notably Vibe and Ms., both of which had garnered substantial returns for the core group of their founding investors. Their business plans spelled out how progress and profit could be compounded. Nobody is more aware of the business potential as well as the political ramifications than Tari Susan Hartman, who has thirty years of experience on the front lines as a political operative, media executive, and champion of the inclusion of actors with disabilities in Hollywood casting. In this pocket history of the media response to political gains she captures the highs and lows: Sitting back on the laurels of our hard-won legislative victories at the south lawn of the White House on a cloud from the ADA victory July 26, 1990, disability pride was in the air, and many of the 2,000 disability rights leaders traveled across country to witness history in the making. We were on top of the world. CNN, AP, all the network and major daily newspapers were there . . . we were finally considered newsworthy! Kick off our shoes and fade out. . . . Circa 1980s: Like other marginalized minority groups, people with disabilities upon realizing independent living issues were not being covered, and/or not covered accurately in mainstream press, set out to form their own specialty media industry and outlets. After all, NPR’s Daniel Schorr is right: “If you don’t exist in the media, for all practical purposes you don’t exist at all.” Some reflect the heart and soul of the disability rights movement, and some are still stuck in the medical...

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