I'm thinking that Disability Nation should run an occasional column about the worst of the worst of media depictions of PWD. Our crusading editor Larry, the J. Jonah Jameson of our little empire, here, found a real pip this week.

And, so, a column idea was born, thanks to the Associated Press, whom I used to worship as a little baby ink-stained wretch. But, much like Yale and the White House, it's increasingly apparent, they now let anyone in.

We've seen it all before.

Usually from medical-model pitchmen like Jerry Lewis who have missed several memos about what year it is and seem to find it acceptable to refer to those children on whose backs he has built a reputation as a humanitarian as "half a person".

I thought I was safe reading something from the Associated Press.

There should be a way to insert ominous John Williams-Jaws-score music when one encounters even a human-interest story so fatally biased as Pauline Arrilaga's "A Wish to Walk"

Of course, then the next scene would be me, reading that appalling first sentence "It was only a chair, but it had become his purgatory."as the music swells and the "duh-duh" starts.

Then, cut to you, my faithful band of readers, leaning forward in your chairs(being not quite the prison implements the reporter seems to consider them, much less a "phantom limb"...what? Be gross if you must, Associated Press, but for God's sake, don't be that inaccurate.), and clutching the harnesses of your service dogs, those of you that can hear the music warn me to "Get out of the house!"

But, like many the buxom horror-movie coed before me, if I do that, there is no story, and I only imagine your wishes to protect me after the fact. Because, even more dangerous than a great white, at least from a psychic standpoint, is another prevalent beastie: Hideous Media, which has invaded the Associated Press

OK, so is it intrinsically awful to write a story about a family that's having a tough time after the dad gets paralyzed? No, not at all. I think even the most optimistic wheeler among us ( a title I lay no claim to, by the way) has many times when we face a hard road and things look daunting and difficult.

Yet images like "John was in a power wheelchair with a chest strap holding him in place. Yet the doctor was essentially telling them: This is your life." add insult to spinal-cord injury, and reduce a complicated man with thoughts and feelings to a functioning level with a pulse. Ugh.

You might say that, since I was born with my disability, I have no idea of the grief and loss expierenced by John and Marci Pou. To a degree, you'd be right, although I don't think anyone gets out of disability(or life) unscathed, and I definitely have had to adjust my hopes and dreams around my impairment to a degree that I would not have to if I could design the world to fit my wishes. But Ms. Arrilaga seems to think that every day with a disability is life spent dwelling on what one has lost, not a matter of living with what you still have.

I'm just a single woman, admittedly, but being that Mr. Pou's children are 6 and 8, what's to stop him from being able to do things with his grandkids, even from a wheelchair? A lot could happen in ten or twenty years, whether the experiment at Project Walk works out or not.

Next time, we'll talk about part 2 of this article and why it's absolutely shoddy journalism for AP reporters to be writing press releases for controversial medical-research projects.