Victims or Heroes?—Disability Representations in a Hungarian Online News Media Portal

Carmen Svastics (), Gabor Petri, Agnes Kozma and Anikó Bernát
Additional contact information
Carmen Svastics: Bárczi Gusztáv Faculty of Special Needs Education, Eötvös Loránd University, 1053 Budapest, Hungary
Gabor Petri: Democracy Institute, Central European University, 1051 Budapest, Hungary
Agnes Kozma: TÁRKI Social Research Institute, 1051 Budapest, Hungary
Anikó Bernát: TÁRKI Social Research Institute, 1051 Budapest, Hungary

Disabilities, 2025, vol. 5, issue 2, 1-16

Abstract: While studies consistently show that the popular media often provide medicalized images of disabled people as “other” or inferior, dynamic societal changes, such as the diffusion of human rights laws, increasing public awareness, and the mediatization of disability activism, also influence media representations. The present research aims to identify relevant discursive practices in Hungarian online news media, a non-Western European country with about 50 years of a state party system under communism, and offer insight into how progressive policy changes and mediatized activism shape media features on disability. To establish the dataset, the most visited and independent online news media portal in Hungary (24.hu) was searched for articles discussing disability between 2019 and 2022. The 481 relevant articles extracted were analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the help of MAXQDA 2020. The findings reveal a multiplicity of disability representations: medicalized and victimized images on the one hand, and reports of resilience and “heroism” on the other. Three distinct discursive practices are identified: (1) traditional/ableist representations, (2) alternative representations with ableist framing, and (3) agency and the co-creation of disability representations. Results suggest that even 30 years after the political changes, disabled people’s collective agency is marginal in Hungary, and that socio-legal changes and mediatized disability activism are yet to influence news media features.

Keywords: disabled people; online news media; social representation; critical discourse analysis; Hungary (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7272/5/2/58/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7272/5/2/58/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jdisab:v:5:y:2025:i:2:p:58-:d:1680248

Access Statistics for this article

Disabilities is currently edited by Ms. Cici Zhou

More articles in Disabilities from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().