A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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psychologically speaking, this feeling of having relationships with media figures
actually makes some sense. As biological organisms, we weren‟t designed for this
paradoxical social situation where we feel that somehow we get to know people
personally from afar (Dill, 2009:53).
Social issues are reduced to the level of the mundane, structural issues are presented as
having their resolution within the domestic sphere. Viewers are addressed as a nation of
individuals who, in spite of the unlikelihood that they will ever actually meet, and in spite of
their different role-related interests, share certain values. Wilson discusses breakfast TV,
observing that:
a basic assumption underlying the text, guiding its agendas and focussing its
concerns, is that families, whether as viewers or viewed, care about caring... „Care‟
is used to mobilise audience consensus around the ethical, often functioning to
displace an inevitably divisive political analysis (Wilson, 2005:33).
The mythical „family of the nation‟ addressed by TV is bound together by individual
relationships of caring and disturbed only by such phenomena as natural catastrophes,
institutional corruption and abnormal human wickedness.
It‟s not that disability is never seen
I want to consider two apparently conflicting comments on the portrayal of disabled people
in the media. Roshni recalls her perception while growing up that disabled people were
rarely seen in media contexts, while Sarah suggests that disability as a subject is never far
from the TV screen:
...I always remember being struck, as a kid, by how few images of
disabled people there were … erm … on TV, on radio, in newspapers...
people that were the same as me, people that I could relate to... (Roshni,
l.2:20ff.)
...there seems to always be disabled people on programmes and things just to raise
the issue of disability, not just to show... it sounds silly... but not just to show
normality... you know what I mean … it‟s always just to show like oh, you‟re a
disabled person bringing up a disabled issue... rather than just being there as they
would in normal life... (Sarah, l.2:26ff.)