“She nicknames her illness as sclera and herself as crip” – depiction of disability on the 24.hu online news media platform

While the representation of persons with disabilities in society is typically reflected in their appearance in the media, the media also reacts to reality, creating common language and perceptions. In the framework of the TARKI research entitled Changing and New Mechanisms of Exclusion of People with Disabilities, we examined articles published over a three-year period (1 May 2019 – 30 April 2022) on one of the largest Hungarian news portals, 24.hu. We sought to answer the question of to what extent and how online news media view persons with disabilities and how they are portrayed. The results show that there is a continuous dynamic of difference-similarity in disability representations. Many factors are at work to marginalize exclude and make invisible people with disabilities (e.g., low incidence, medicalization, infantilization, belittling, taboo), but an alternative, resistant perspective also emerges, which presents a more diverse picture and in which the voices of those affected themselves are heard (blogs, websites, social media platforms, etc.).