Fans of the Paralympics rejoiced when YouTube made its 11th hour announcement that a special channel would broadcast 500 hours of live events from the London games. With NBC planning to air recap programs only, it was a boon to people in the United States and Canada who wanted to watch world-class athletes with disabilities [...]
While broadcast coverage of events like the Paralympics will always leave some wanting more, we are fortunate to live in an age when anyone can add their two cents to the international conversation via blogging. Let’s look at some of man and woman-on-the-street accounts from netizens celebrating the achievements of people with disabilities. Traditional media [...]
As athletes tested themselves against the stopwatches, scorekeepers, and their fellow competitors at the 14th Paralympic games in England, another type of drama was unfolding outside of the event venues. It began bubbling during the Opening Ceremonies, when it was noted that athletes for the host country had tucked their ID lanyards inside their warm-up [...]
No doubt that one of the biggest stories from the 2012 Paralympic Games in London was Alan Oliveira of Brazil outracing South Africa’s Oscar Pistorius to a gold medal in the 200-meter race. Pistorius was the Paralympic’s most recognizable athlete, having just received international exposure for competing in the Olympic Games, so the news of [...]
The 14th Paralympic Games held Closing Ceremonies yesterday in London’s Olympic Stadium. Even if U.S. media had been committed to providing more live coverage of the events leading into the game, it would have been difficult for the day-to-day stories to garner public awareness during a news cycle that included national conventions for the two [...]
A couple weeks ago, when our attention was focused on the preparation for the Paralympic games in London, we stumbled across The Washington Times editorial, whose full title, “Holder’s ‘severe mental deficiency’: Justice Department takes affirmative action to crazy extremes,” was certainly provocative enough to warrant a click-through. The op-ed’s content was as abhorrent as [...]
When Rick Santorum came to the part of his Republican National Convention speech that mentioned “the disabled,” television cameras had already identified a section of the Tampa Bay Times Forum where several people in wheelchairs sat watching and cut to a floor view that silhouetted their figures in front of the brightly lit arena backdrop. [...]
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush was one of the Republican National Convention speakers who brought people with disabilities into the conversation. In fact, his discussion of the improvement of Florida’s school system since 1999 arguably made it the most substantive speech of the entire week. As we acknowledged yesterday, substance and policy are not exactly [...]
It was fun last week to read and report on the preparation and launch of the 14th Paralympic Games, and hopefully there will be more stories to share about the participating athletes, the coverage, and what it all means for people with disabilities and how they can break that glass ceiling — as Miranda did [...]