Analyzing the discourse surrounding Autism in the New York Times using an ableism lens
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The topic of Autism is highly within academic literature (over 20000 articles in the database PubMed of US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health and the public domain (79 Million hits in Google). Newspapers also show a great interest in autism. However despite the prevalence of autism coverage very little media analysis has been performed. We present here an analysis of the coverage of autism in the New York Times from the time the term autism first appeared (1973) to 2012. Ability expectations and preferences are one dynamic through which members of a group judge others, themselves and their lives. Ability preferences and judgments are at the root of many rules of behaviours and customs. Ableism was one lens through which we analyzed the discourse surrounding autism in the NYT. We found that readers that rely on the NYT as a primary source of information get very limited information about what autism is and what factors are associated with autism and they are heavily exposed to a medical narrative. We suggest that the negative, medical narrative adds to the problems people with autism face. Keywords: autism; perception; media; New York Times; language; ableism
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it