MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY IN PRINT MEDIA

Article 33 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities specifically calls upon State Parties to establish a framework to monitor the implementation of the Convention. This paper is drawn out of a larger study that addresses the challenge of monitoring the Portuguese State compliance with the CRPD by conducting a holistic monitoring of the current status of disability law and policy, media representations and daily life experiences of persons with disabilities in Portugal. In this paper, we will present and discuss the results of a study of social representations of disability and disabled people found through media analyses. How people with disabilities are perceived in society and how they perceive themselves is highly influenced by the ways in which they are portrayed in the media. To conduct this analysis we selected three of the most important print media outlets in terms of audiences in Portugal and surveyed all the published articles that addressed the subject of disability over the last five years (from 2009 until 2013). Content analysis was conducted to determine different dimensions: a) news variables, such as number of articles, their placement, highlight, type, news dimension and disability prominence; b) disability variables, such as disability types covered in the news and main covered topics, disability information sources and main disability voice in the news; and c) media awareness on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as well as framing mechanisms. Implications of these results will also be discussed as a key dimension to understand the current rights situation of persons with disabilities in Portugal.