Abstract:

Labelling people with disabilities with terms such as "disabled", "handicapped" or "deaf" focuses on their limitations. They are put in an inferior position to the rest of the population and all disabled people are equalized, even though they are individuals who are not identified solely by their medical condition. Analysis of media pluralism as well as the features of discourse in public space in relation to persons with disabilities indicate that - primarily in the media environment - the use of inclusively unacceptable terminology contributes to the deepening of institutional discrimination and building the barriers to the equal opportunities approach for persons with disabilities. Also, there are frames that depict people with disabilities as kind of a heroes, who despite their "handicap" manage to achieve excellent results in every day’s life. This extreme brings them repeatedly to an inferior position by using terms that focuses on person’s limitations and not on the person as such. Furthermore, it was observed that people with disabilities are not visible in the media unless the topic is related to their impairment or the difficulty they live with. The terminology used to address disability agenda is extremely important because it can lead to stigmatization, discrimination, i.e., understanding a person only in the light of his limitation. Use of inclusively acceptable vocabulary and speech enables understanding, respect, and acceptance of diversity in public space and leads to an inclusive society.

Considering all the mentioned, it is very important to educate future journalists and media experts with the aim sensibilisation and adopting an inclusive platform in their professional ethos. Diversity and awareness-oriented education of future media experts and journalists which was supported through strengthening of qualitative research methods skills, has been carried out for the past few years at the undergraduate study of Communication, Media and Journalism at the Croatian University “North”. Similar topics were also discussed in previous papers. For the purposes of this paper, the students have designed and conducted research aiming to identify the frequency of unacceptable terminological determinants/terms in accordance with the social model of disability in the lifestyle media outlets. The convenient sample of media included publication in lifestyle portals in the United Kingdom (n=5), Spain (n=5), Italy (n=5) and in Croatia (n=5) in the period from the year 2020-2022.

The sample of terminologically unacceptable superordinate terms on the analysed lifestyle portal includes:
1) Invalid/Disabled/ Invalido/ Non valido;
2) Hendikep/Handicap/Disadvantage/Handicap;
3) Gluhonijem/Deaf and dumb/ Sordo ciego/ Sordo e muto.

In the observed period, a total of 475 inclusively unacceptable terms were found in 275 analysed publications, of which the smallest frequency was found in British lifestyle media (n=15; 3%), followed by Spanish (n=28; 6%) and Italian (n=114; 24%) and the largest number was excluded in Croatian lifestyle media (n=318; 67%). The need for a systematic and comprehensive strengthening of the intercultural competences of future media workers was demonstrated. the public audience's level of awareness regarding the discriminatory and inclusively unacceptable terminology to which they are exposed through media to a large extent emerging as an interesting topic for future research.

Keywords:

Inclusively unacceptable media terminology, lifestyle media, postgraduate media students’ education, social model of disability, quantitative content analysis.