Representations of autism in Australian print media

Abstract

The mass media provides a frame for discourse around important health issues, and it has been widely demonstrated that the development and reinforcement of stereotypes of minority groups are strongly influenced by the news and entertainment media. An extensive search of academic databases failed to locate any studies which examined the representation of autism in the news media, although there were a number of articles on the media role in the autism and MMR debate. This paper reports on an examination of the extent, and nature, of coverage of 'autism spectrum disorders' in the Australian print media between 1996 and 2005. Key findings include a relatively limited amount of factual information and a dual stereotype of people labeled as having autism as either dangerous and uncontrollable or unloved and poorly treated. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the nature and tone of this coverage of autism and its potential impact on individuals described as 'autistic', their families and carers and the community in general.

Autistic people’s perspectives on stereotypes: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

“…Media representations of autistic people, for example, often portray them in a negative way (Anjay, Palanivel and Palanivel, 2011;Maras, Mulcahy and Crane, 2015), though an exception is the "autistic savant" (Anjay, Palanivel and Palanivel, 2011;Conn and Bhugra, 2012;Draaisma, 2009;Tang and Bie, 2016). Other stereotypes depict autistic people as either dangerous and uncontrollable or unloved and poorly treated (Jones & Harwood, 2009), in addition to having a range of negative traits such as being disruptive and distracting to others (White, Hillier, Frye et al, 2016), unsocial, quiet and emotionless (Harnum, Duffy and Ferguson, 2007).…”

Students’ Stereotypes of Autism

“…Examination of media representations suggests that the media perpetuates negative and inaccurate characterisations of autism. Recent content analyses of both Australian and British print media report that autistic people are often portrayed as unstable or dangerous (Huws & Jones, 2011;Jones & Harwood, 2009), and that the prevalence of savant skills is overstated (Jones & Harwood, 2009). Draaisma (2009) similarly notes that it is very difficult to think of an example of a character in a film or television series who is autistic but who does not have some form of savant skill.…”

“…The latter sets of traits were included in order to provide appropriate comparison groups for interpreting the valence of the stereotype of autism. Given the literature reviewed above, concerning negative media representations and lay perceptions of autism (i.e., Huws & Jones, 2010;Huws & Jones, 2011;Jones & Harwood, 2009) we expected the stereotype of ASC to be largely pejorative.…”

Employment, Disabled People and Robots: What Is the Narrative in the Academic Literature and Canadian Newspapers?

“…Newspapers are known to be influenced by their environment including ownership, funding, need for circulation, advertisement revenue and the readers' preference for reading like-minded news . The bias of how newspapers report on disabled people is well known in the areas of how disabled people are portrayed [95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111], how the coverage of topics of importance to disabled people ignore disabled people [112] and how many topics that report on disabled people do so in a problematic way [33,113,114].…”