As athletes tested themselves against the stopwatches, scorekeepers, and their fellow competitors at the 14th Paralympic games in England, another type of drama was unfolding outside of the event venues. It began bubbling during the Opening Ceremonies, when it was noted that athletes for the host country had tucked their ID lanyards inside their warm-up [...]
No doubt that one of the biggest stories from the 2012 Paralympic Games in London was Alan Oliveira of Brazil outracing South Africa’s Oscar Pistorius to a gold medal in the 200-meter race. Pistorius was the Paralympic’s most recognizable athlete, having just received international exposure for competing in the Olympic Games, so the news of [...]
A couple weeks ago, when our attention was focused on the preparation for the Paralympic games in London, we stumbled across The Washington Times editorial, whose full title, “Holder’s ‘severe mental deficiency’: Justice Department takes affirmative action to crazy extremes,” was certainly provocative enough to warrant a click-through. The op-ed’s content was as abhorrent as [...]
When Rick Santorum came to the part of his Republican National Convention speech that mentioned “the disabled,” television cameras had already identified a section of the Tampa Bay Times Forum where several people in wheelchairs sat watching and cut to a floor view that silhouetted their figures in front of the brightly lit arena backdrop. [...]
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush was one of the Republican National Convention speakers who brought people with disabilities into the conversation. In fact, his discussion of the improvement of Florida’s school system since 1999 arguably made it the most substantive speech of the entire week. As we acknowledged yesterday, substance and policy are not exactly [...]
It was fun last week to read and report on the preparation and launch of the 14th Paralympic Games, and hopefully there will be more stories to share about the participating athletes, the coverage, and what it all means for people with disabilities and how they can break that glass ceiling — as Miranda did [...]
“There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.” So said physicist Stephen Hawking at the onset of the Opening Ceremonies for the 14th Paralympic Games Wednesday night in London. The Associated Press story found on ESPN.com from which I pulled this quote provides a [...]
England’s wave of enthusiasm for Olympic competition is expected to carry over into the Paralympic games, which start tomorrow. At least Channel 4 is hoping that’s the case; the British television network has committed to more than 500 hours of coverage across its broadcast and online properties and, as we noted yesterday, invested £600,000 in [...]
Picking up where we left off last week with a discussion about the 2012 Paralympic Games starting this Wednesday, and in particular the media coverage of the events that more than 4,2000 athletes with disabilities representing 166 countries will be participating in during their visit to London, England. David Stringer’s Associated Press article, “Full TV [...]
What was more fun than watching this year’s Summer Olympics? The answer, evidently, was complaining about stateside coverage of the games in London. Criticizing NBC became kind of a social media sporting event in and of itself; with viewers participating in events like the “live-coverage-channel-search” and the “news-broadcast-results-announcement-dodge.” In many people’s estimation, the network broke [...]