When Lauren Lethbridge was winning national honours as a gymnast she had much more than the beam and the uneven bars to contend with.
Lethbridge was born at 26 weeks and has a genetic disorder. Her conditions have caused her to suffer respiratory arrest and to break both her feet simultaneously; once while competing and once while training. The apparatus she depended on to perform included the intravenous lines sustaining her body.
It was only when doctors found she had blood clots that put her at risk from hanging upside down, that she finally ended a glittering career that brought successive national titles at the British Disability Championships. She also competed nationally in mainstream gymnastics as a child.
So when Lethbridge takes her place in the press box for the Paralympics in Paris this summer, she will do so with exceptional empathy for the athletes taking part.
After withdrawing from gymnastics she completed a degree and a master’s in literature at University College London. She has chosen to go into journalism because she still believes in the news media’s capacity to change society for the better. “There are fascinating conversations happening within academia but they don’t seem to dissipate out,” she says. “I wanted to have a voice that people might actually listen to and really join in with the discourse.”
She was inspired by the media’s intervention in the sex abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics, investigated by the Indianapolis Star and CBS show 60 Minutes and later featured in the Netflix documentary Athlete A. ITV News subsequently uncovered a culture of physical and emotional abuse in British gymnastics. “The gymnasts found their voice and utilised the media as a way of telling their stories and I am really drawn to that,” says Lethbridge.
Her gateway to the media was Ability Today, a social enterprise and skills academy for disabled people which runs journalism courses in partnership with the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ). It currently has more than 90 disabled journalists on its programme.
Matt Bassett, a wheelchair user with a spinal cord injury, passed through the academy before recently landing a position at BBC Wales.
Emily Davison, who is severely sight-impaired and was formerly a prolific blogger on social media, is a trainee journalist on the News Shopper, a south London title owned by Newsquest. Jamie Green, who has cerebral palsy and is a wheelchair user, has won a contract at ITV Meridian.
Ability Today was created by Grant Logan, a former music business manager who worked with pop groups including Hear’Say and Five but was left paralysed from the chest down after a car crash. Dependent on a wheelchair, he became a digital media entrepreneur, creating an early social network called The Wheel Life and later teaching filming skills to disabled vloggers.
He teamed up with the NCTJ to create a journalism academy and changed the name of his organisation from Disability Today to Ability Today after adopting the slogan: “Let’s focus on what we can do, not what we can’t.” The project has built strong connections with the media industry. The BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner, Sky News’s managing editor, Louise Hastings, and Newsquest’s head of editorial artificial intelligence, Jody Doherty-Cove, have been among those addressing students. News UK and Newsquest have provided work placements.
The next batch of 20 disabled journalism students must apply to Ability Today’s academy by Thursday. “When we started we never believed we would have students working at the BBC, ITV, Newsquest… that was just a dream,” says Logan. “Now I only want to bring on students who see this as a pathway to a career in journalism, not a hobby. We want the best candidates possible.”
Considering that disability is reckoned to affect 20 per cent of the population it receives minimal attention in discussions over media diversity.
The anger over the Government’s new WorkWell reforms to the welfare system – attacked as a “full-on assault on disabled people” – might have been higher on the news agenda with better disabled representation in newsrooms.
For too long these have been hyper-competitive workspaces that made no allowances for anyone who was not super-confident, sharp-elbowed and nimble of foot.
But things are slowly changing. Channel 4 has chosen Ruben Reuter, a journalist with Down’s syndrome, for its election reporting team. Lethbridge, who recently attended CNN’s London base for an open day, is excited about her assignment in Paris, filing reports for Ability Today.
“It is a little bit daunting,” she says, but she is anxious to work alongside the Paralympics media corps. “I have met so many people who have so much goodwill and really want to make the field more accessible to all kinds of people.”
Is the media industry finally embracing disability?