title: Good, Bad or Absent: Discourses of Parents with Disabilities in Australian News Media.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  News media frames public perceptions. As such, news media becomes a useful source of analysis to understand the presence (or otherwise) of people with disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities, within parenting discourses in Australia.
  
  
  METHODS
  Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examines major Australian newspapers over the period from January 2004 to December 2008, critiquing the construction of parenting and disability. A small number of articles are examined in close depth for tone, polarity syntactic and paradigmatic choice, deconstructing the underlying discourses that shape the article and thereby popular perceptions of parenting and disability.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Discourses of care and child protection are emphasized in news articles about parenting, creating perceptions that negate the role of people with disabilities as parents. Such perceptions result in a systematic symbolic castration of people with intellectual disabilities from the role of parent in Australian society.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  By providing a framework for understanding the public perceptions of parents with disabilities (particularly intellectual disabilities), this paper demonstrates that changes are necessary in Australian media reporting on parents with disabilities to bring such reporting more closely in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2006.
authors.affiliation: Australian Family and Disability Studies Research Collaboration, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
authors.forename: Vikki
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Fraser
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Health Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
authors.forename: Gwynnyth
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Llewellyn
mesh_terms: D001315:Australia; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D008402:Mass Media; D016487:Parenting; D010290:Parents
keywords: disability; media; parenting