By Susan M. LoTempio

RELATED

"Disabled Group Members Arrested at McCain's Office," The Associated Press "John McCain Gets Tax-Free Disability Pension," Los Angeles Times

One of the hot-button issues for Americans with disabilities is institutional care versus in-home care for people who get Medicaid assistance. Currently, the regulations lean toward putting people in nursing homes, rather than paying for care in their own home.

Disabled or not, which would you prefer? For many people with disabilities it's a no-brainer: They want some assistance so they can stay in their own homes.

A few weeks ago, a group of disabled activists connected to ADAPT, a group that's worked on this issue for years, caused a bit of a ruckus outside Sen. John McCain's office in the Russell Senate Office Building. They wanted to meet with the Republican candidate for president about a bill that would amend the Social Security Act to allow people who are eligible for Medicaid coverage of nursing home costs to spend it instead on home-based or community care.

McCain was not in the office at the time, but more than 20 activists were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. The candidate's staff said the activists did not have an appointment to speak with him. The activists, many of who are wheelchair users, are frustrated that the bill, supported by Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, has been stuck in committee since last year.

And stuck is exactly how people with disabilities feel -- stuck that they can't choose where it's best for them to live, and stuck because so little attention has been given to the issue by the mainstream media.

There's a bit of irony in the fact that it was McCain's office the activists stormed, considering the nation recently learned that the senator collected close to a $60,000 "disability pension" from the Navy.

According to the Los Angeles Times, his staff explained that "McCain was retired as disabled because of his limited body movements due to injuries as a POW." So, does that make John McCain officially a person with a disability?

It's doubtful he'd ever identify himself as such, though being seen as a disabled veteran has seemed to work for him at times on the campaign trail.

McCain's official Web site claims he "has been a leading advocate in the Senate for disabled veterans throughout his entire career." But on issues important to non-veterans, disabled activists say McCain hasn't been so supportive.

I'm waiting for reporters to get McCain on the record regarding the proposed Medicaid changes, the weakened Americans with Disabilities Act and the plethora of other issues that affect 54 million Americans with disabilities. These issues range from too-high unemployment rates to too few educational opportunities to too-high poverty rates.

We know McCain's position on the Iraq War, on immigration and on the federal budget. Now it's time to ask some other questions.
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By Sally Lehrman

Wouldn't you love to have an audience that is "passionate," "committed" and "engaged"? That's the way Kay Madati and Lynette Clemetson describe the people who visit their Web sites, who discuss, comment and meet up over the news every day.

Madati heads up marketing for Community Connect, a set of social networking Web sites directed at niche audiences: black Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, religious people and the GLBT community -- or as the site calls it, "gays, lesbians and everyone else." Clemetson manages editorial for theroot.com, an online commentary and news site that emphasizes black voices.

Don't dismiss the high level of involvement in these spaces as a phenomenon of the Internet. Mainstream news outlets might have enjoyed the loyalty of the news, information and entertainment junkies that frequent such sites. But "a dumbing down, a lack of nuance, push people out," says Clemetson, who used to cover social and political issues for The New York Times and before that, Newsweek. People flock here -- and targeted online news media in general -- because "they're not represented by general market media or engaged by it," Madati agrees.

In journalism training sessions sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists and MarketWire a couple of weeks ago, Clemetson and Madati spoke often about the "authenticity" their audiences demand. That may seem like an ideal that is difficult to penetrate, a characteristic a journalist is lucky to be born with but probably can't learn. Fortunately, though, these niche sites rely on very accessible techniques: a profound understanding of their audience, an authority about relevant topics and a habit of heading straight into areas of depth.

These practices are simply a matter of attention and care, with a strong dose of respect for the people who rely on us for news. Clemetson warns about the assumptions we make about certain groups -- would a mainstream news outlet, for instance, hire a black chef to share healthy recipes and write about "eco" soul food? Check out Bryant Terry's Eco-Soul Kitchen and see what you think.

Bruno Lopez, who runs the online operations for Univision.com, offered advice that we've heard again and again, yet still seem to find it hard to follow. "You have to go outside of your newsroom and see what people are talking about," he suggested. Besides sending people out onto the street, Univision tabulates the topics that float up as top search queries and editors check in on online community discussions.

Lopez also warns against assuming that any "niche" community is monolithic. The Spanish speakers who Univision serves, for example, cut many ways in their views, concerns and culture. Univision must think carefully about audience fragmentation by national origin and generation. Editors even created a pan-Hispanic style guide to ensure that terminology will be easily understood -- and not insult -- people from a variety of "Hispanic" backgrounds. At the moment, people of Mexican descent make up more than half of Univision’s market, but South Americans are rising in volume online. "We monitor (our users) for national origin to see whether our main page needs to be shifting in response," Lopez explains.

Such attention to audience helps create a space where users can deepen their exchanges beyond the superficial. On theroot.com, for instance, users are discussing the relationships between Africans, African Americans and people from the Caribbean. Niche sites may offer a safe space for debates that hardly ever make it to the mainstream. But the mainstream overlooks far too many discussions and a level of depth that might add vibrancy to the news for all of us.

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By Keith Woods

RELATED

"Beyond Rape: One Survivor's Story," by Joanna Connors, The Plain Dealer "Telling Our Own Stories, Becoming Better Journalists," by Mallary Tenore, The Poynter Institute

In her remarkable story, "Beyond Rape: A Survivor's Journey" Joanna Connors, a reporter at The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, writes about her experiences getting raped. But the story isn't just about rape. It also addresses important issues of race and class.

The essential tension resides in a simple and explosive event, now 20 years old: A black man raped a white woman. The history of that potent narrative is packed with truth and lies, racist injustice and racial suspicion, cliché and mythology.

This story lurches powerfully into race in the first of five chapters, as Connors speculates that she might have run away in the awkward moments before David Francis attacked her had it not been for the fear that she'd appear racist. A few paragraphs later, readers learn that the rapist taunted Connors, asking if she'd fantasized about sex with a black man. That's a pretty raw entrée into race in what was already a bold step into another taboo.

Then things really get interesting. Connors tracks down Francis' family and interweaves her story with theirs. As I followed her into the black and poor side of Cleveland, I found myself bracing. Would some misguided liberal guilt cause her to ennoble this man and his family, with their hard upbringing and harder lives, now that she'd seen up close the truth of the country's racial and class divide? Would she stumble into stereotype or worse? Would this become part of a long list of bleeding-heart tales that end with, "and I found out these poor black people were just like me"?

No. No. And no.

The beauty of the story -- beyond the excellent reporting and writing -- is that it embraces the complex messiness of race and class so that you can feel repulsed and sympathetic before getting from one end of a paragraph to the other. That sort of writing rejects the idea that there is a single, grand truth to deliver and, instead, lays out a set of conflicting images that cause you not to judge, but to think. I had a lingering question when I was done, which I sent to Stuart Warner, the editor who called my attention to the piece:


Connors wrote me to say that there was one more element to inform her fateful decision in the theater -- what she called the "good girl tape" running through her head. It says, "don't be rude," Connors wrote, and it might have caused her to follow a white man into the theater 20 years ago for fear of offending him in another way. The lesson about race in all that, to me, is that journalism's pursuit of simple cause-effect stories leads us to stop too early in interviewing, falling short of mitigating facts that would paint a less absolute -- but more accurate -- picture of things racial.

One last note about the series: among the reasons the editors decided to run the package in a single day rather than spreading it out over five days had to do with race: the cumulative picture of the black characters in the story is nuanced and deep. But The Plain Dealer staff decided that it was easy to see little more than stereotype if you read some of the chapters out of context. It's something to think about any time you're following a developing story about race relations or racial conflict.

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