Some real talk about The Mighty
Some thoughts on recent discussions about The Mighty, which considers itself to be a sort of clearinghouse on disability. For those unfamiliar, the site recently ran a ‘meltdown bingo’ article, in which a mother made fun of her autistic child with a ‘bingo card.’ After considerable criticism from autistics and others, the editors pulled it, apologising for that particular editorial decision.
The editors asked readers:
What improvements do you want to see made on The Mighty?
Which websites and writers are covering this space the right way?
What are we doing right? If we know this, we can do more of it.
(Two good roundups on the situation: ‘Two Ethical Futures for The Mighty,’ ‘Thoughts on #CrippingTheMighty’)
I’m going to get back to these questions, but first I need to step back and talk about the media model that is The Mighty. Founded in 2014, the site likes to advertise itself as an aw shucks, small, humble publication, but it raised nearly 2.5 million in VC funding. The site follows very familiar web paradigms: It’s a clickbait setup, designed to draw immense traffic for the purpose of generating advertising revenue. In this case, it does so via the fetishisation of disability and the creation of inspiration porn, a known traffic driver. It operates along the lines of sites like Upworthy, or, for that matter, UP TV, which recently attracted quite reasonable ire for a video featuring poor children forced to choose between presents for themselves and their families.
Functionally, this is a site for parents to host pity parties in which they present information about what a burden it is to have disabled children. It’s also a place where parents refer to themselves by their children’s diagnoses, as though they have become entirely subsumed by their children’s disabilities, another way to signal that they’re utterly burdened. (’Autism mom,’ ‘kidney mom,’ etc) It’s a place of shocking disregard for disabled people and, unsurprisingly, includes rather a lot of actively disablist content. When we say ‘nothing about us without us’ — a phrase that I would like to remind you originated in the disability movement — this is what we mean.
The site advertises 80 million readers and 1,700 ‘contributors,’ and here is where things become even more typical for internet platforms: These ‘contributors’ are not paid for their writing, instead submitting purely for ‘exposure.’ The site invites visitors to ‘submit a story,’ offering monthly themes that are very clearly targeted SEO — for example, creating listicles or year-end roundups. Their ‘small editorial team’ may make changes, but rest assured, they’ll run them by contributors first — this has not, however, been the case according to disabled people who have reported that their work was edited substantially or they were asked to remove ‘controversial’ material around self advocacy and independence. Pointedly, no mention is made of payment (you’ll see an absence of payment discussions again on its advertised internships, and the company likely also doesn’t pay its interns). You will also note that in its job listings, none of the positions explicitly provide requirements that people be disabled — which would be illegal — but the site also doesn’t prominently post EEOC notices or suggest that minorities are encouraged to apply, which can serve as a shibboleth to minority applicants that their applications will be taken seriously and a workplace will be welcoming.
Why disabled people would apply there, I don’t know — I actually took a look at one of their editorial positions because I hadn’t heard of the site and when I landed on the front page I immediately fled in terror.
So let us return to the editorial demands that we tell them how to fix their website. Firstly, of course, had their desire to build a site that benefited the disability community been genuine, they would have consulted disabled people from the start and included them from the ground up on the construction of the site and the editorial team. This post from the editors includes three separate and offensive demands in the form of questions, but first, this little nugget:
If you don’t see your voice represented on The Mighty, send us a post. Tell us when we’ve generalized your experiences. Give us and others a new point of view to learn from. Share your story.
Here we see a really common response to criticisms of media organisations and ‘progressive’ sites — ‘if you don’t like it, build it yourself.’ This puts the burden on disabled people to perform unpaid intellectual and emotional labour for a site that will profit from their ‘contributions.’
What improvements do you want to see made on The Mighty?
Given the clearly-articulated feedback on the subject, the answer to this is pretty clear. People want to see the site actually addressing the disability community with work by disabled people, for disabled people, and by disabled people for nondisabled people who need to understand disability. There are numerous platforms for viewing disability through a nondisabled lens. The Mighty could stand out as a platform that flips this paradigm, but it won’t, because this is not a profitable funding model, and the site knows this. I know it — as a journalist, the stories I have the hardest time placing are disability-related, and they’re the ones that get the lowest pageviews, effectively serving as labours of love between myself and editors who believe they are important to run but know they won’t attract traffic unless they play to very specific paradigms about disability.
Thus, this question is a red herring: The site is profitable now and it’s accountable to advertisers and the VCs who have contributed to its three (and counting) rounds of funding. It doesn’t care about readers and writers. If it did, it would be putting disabled people in editorial, screening content for disablism, and paying contributors.
Which websites and writers are covering this space the right way?
Google exists. There are numerous news sites covering disability as well as freelance journalists (like myself, for example) who discuss it on a number of platforms. There are also thousands of disability bloggers, many of whom would likely be interested in writing for a larger platform with an aggressively progressive, autonomous, independent presentation of disability issues. If they are paid for it.
What are we doing right? If we know this, we can do more of it.
I’m not intimately familiar with The Mighty, so this isn’t a question I can speak to with authority, but from following #CrippingtheMighty (started by activist alice wong) I can see that some people have identified good articles amidst the dross, almost entirely by disabled writers who have managed to filter through strict editorial controls on ‘acceptable content.’
The problem, though, with this whole debate, which is the tl;dr of this post, is this: The disability community is responding to this with #CrippingtheMighty and a conversation about the site, but this, in my opinion, is a mistake. The issue here is that the site has no incentive to change and that in fact its entire funding model is based on continuing exactly as it is. The Mighty is saccharine, sappy, inspiration clickbait because that is what generates traffic, and it wants to show good growth for potential investors, so it’s not going to waste money paying contributors when it knows that it can exploit people who are eager to see their names in print.
The Mighty is irredeemable from the perspective of people who want a mainstream platform to talk about disability from a perspective that’s actually centring disabled people themselves. For that, people instead need to turn to features on sites like Reveal, which regularly covers disability issues but isn’t disability-centric. Sites like Disability Horizons and New Mobility often have great content but unfortunately cater specifically to the disability community, because they can’t reach a wider audience. Annaham and I started Disability Intersections specifically to speak to our desire to see more disability represented in social justice conversations, particularly from an intersectional angle, but we are only two people, it’s difficult to recruit contributors, and we, not having $2.5 million in VC funding, can’t afford to pay people, which makes it difficult to ask people to invest their energy, skillset, experience, and intellectual labour in producing work for us. (We also do not profit, however.) Even were the site to be more active, even were it to transition into an actual media organisation instead of a group blog, it wouldn’t attract anywhere near the traffic that The Mighty does because our tight editorial controls mean that we’re really not interested in publishing anything by people who are not disabled, and we also value substantive critical content from a social justice framework. This is not the kind of content that drives traffic, as I can tell you from my own experience gained over a decade in editorial and performing SEO analysis.
Perhaps the big takeaway here is that nondisabled people are not interested in disability, and the best way to change that is to push for better coverage of disability at existing mainstream sites with wide readership, like Buzzfeed, which has been using its clickbait model to drive and fund truly excellent investigative journalism and reported features, including some work on disability. (Now if only Buzzfeed could institute a moratorium on inspiration porn.) Maybe someday that will feed into a world where people do want to read a disability-specific site that’s powered by disabled people and doesn’t include inspiration porn and an exploitative contributing model, but I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.
Until then, don’t bother trying to crip The Mighty. Lobby the mainstream sites you like reading to include more disability coverage. Drive traffic to their disability-related content (when it’s good) to show that it will get pageviews and appeal to advertisers. Write to them when you have a problem with what they’re doing and tell them why. Last year, I conducted an audit of some of the most trafficked news sites in English for the Daily Dot, and found that nearly all of them failed.
Change that. Don’t bother trying to reform a site rooted in clickbait that has no genuine intentions of reform.
