Autism Portrayal in Newspaper Corpora of Different Politically-affiliated States

Abstract

Media representation has become an increasingly important concern for marginalized and/or disenfranchised communities over the past several years. Neurodivergent and disabled people, for example, have been largely underrepresented (Mellifont, 2019) - as such, it is important to consider how these individuals are portrayed, and whether these representations are helpful towards the communities in question. I aim to address and document these ideologies by examining a dataset of newspaper articles containing the search term “autism”; using corpus analysis and discourse analysis, I demonstrate the rhetorical themes pertaining to media representation of individuals with autism in newspaper discourse. Ultimately, I argue that autism representation in the media is not only specifically tied to its linguistic portrayal, but also to its particular sociopolitical context. 

I first document the importance of discourse to the construction of autism and the autistic experience, explaining how media texts are complicatedly mediatized and therefore fundamental to people’s perceptions of this disorder. Next, I explain my particular methodological approach and describe my data collection process. I then introduce my corpus of newspaper texts and explain how each dataset differs according to political persuasion. This is followed by qualitative analysis of extracts which I identified according to the primary rhetorical themes: (1) labeling; (2) age; and (3) gender. I conclude by mentioning how the experiences of people with autism appear to be overly generalized, and often seem to perpetuate problematic stereotypes. These discursive trends are prevalent across the corpus but do seem to be more typical in conservative-leaning geographic areas.