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"Coping with adversity" is still a winner with the Pulitzer Prize committee, writes Center for An Accessible Society's Beth Haller in The Baltimore Sun.
This year's Pulitzer for feature reporting, for the Portland Oregonian's series on teen Sam Lightner, "focused primarily on Sam's deformity and medical concerns about removing it," she writes, and "made little mention of the prejudice he experienced -- the prejudice that drove him to consider the life-threatening surgery."
Haller has studied national journalism award-winners dealing with disability or illness; she says the notion of disability and chronic illness as tragedy "fits squarely with journalistic news values that focus on the unusual or the dramatic." But there are problems with the approach
Read Haller's article from the April 29 Baltimore Sun.
Read the Pulitzer Prize-winning Oregonian series
Haller is Associate Professor of Journalism at Towson University. She can be reached at (410) 704-2442 (E-Mail: bhaller@towson.edu; Fax: (410) 704-3656).
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Media Circus, from Ragged Edge magazine