jenniferlaurenkates:

How did NPR end up repackaging extreme right-wing talking points into a week-long series claiming to tell the “hidden” truth about disability’s explosive growth in our recession economy? Journalist Chana Joffe-Walt says she spent six months “reporting on the growth of federal disability programs”  and trying to “understand what that meant.”  She gets it almost all completely wrong, down to the beautifully-colored graphs.  Here are some clues as to why.

I just listened to this podcast this week and was absolutely shocked at what Joffe-Walt uncovered, that instead of people taking minimum wage jobs or going on welfare, people are choosing to go on disability “a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net”. I was planning to link to it here.

Turns out the episode has been largely discredited. If more people are now on disability it is because more people are disabled in the United States, not just pretending to be, as the story claims.

Although NPR helped stoke a dangerous mythology with this series, the truth does still tend to prevail. Eventually, lies overreach and the seams show.  Maybe a bartender gets mad and pulls back the curtain. You can’t “incentivize” someone to get a job that doesn’t exist. People really are disabled, and the poverty-level benefits they receive are not actually like winning the lottery. Workers do need sick days. Teachers are not parasites destroying our schools.  And I want to think that you can’t trick us into supporting disastrous cuts to programs we support and benefit from, programs that protect the most vulnerable among us.

If you listened to Joffe-Walt’s story on This American Life I strongly encourage you to read this article fact-checking the whole thing.