I thought I already had this blog post in my drafts, but apparently not. I guess I’ve just said it around the internet in a few places or in messages and thought I’d drafted it. Given today’s Guardian article it seemed timely to finally gather the ad-hoc comments I’ve made over the years into a blog post.
The TL;DR is that the media’s standards are too low for me.
There is no guarantee your appearance will be faithfully shared.
You could be cut into soundbites that misrepresent your experiences and opinion.
They can choose to publish you in whatever way they want without your approval.
The media takes no responsibility for protecting you after the fact.
We know that most comment sections are trash. The media takes zero responsibility for the strangers who will highly likely attack you and the legitimacy of your lived experience.
There’s no responsibility on the media to protect you from being targeted or doxxed or anything as a result of being in their production.
The media is more interested in both sides-ing at all costs.
Particularly relevant in today’s article, there is no both sides-ing of medical fucking science.
It’s a tale you’ll see in any chronic illness group – shitty grifter who got medical treatment that luckily worked for them, and conveniently they forget all about that treatment and sell you some wishy washy mindset bullshit as the actual cure. Granted even many doctors are completely shit at cause and effect, but I expect everyone to be able to work with some basic logic.
Your energy is not respected
It takes a lot to prepare – reading articles ready to cite when asked, maybe traveling to a location – and for what? No guarantee that you will be accurately and respectfully treated? That’s a nope from me.
Most of us have been forced to become our own support and our own researchers – and then when we’ve spent all this time preparing you’ll find it’s common to have the complexity and nuance stripped away into a soundbite.
Unfortunately I saw this coming a mile away. The original article that SBS published wasn’t bad at all. However, I refused to watch the episode because on that page you’ll see it marketed as “invisible illness or all in their mind”. That told me all I needed to know about the approach they’d be taking. And it seems I was correct. I fucking hate being correct on this stuff.
Do you do media? Do you trust the media to represent chronic illness? What other variables have I forgotten to include in this 30 second brain dump of a blog post?
