Autism Is Not About You

People with autism get a relentlessly raw deal in the media, and even from the largest organization supposedly devoted to helping them, so it was refreshing to finally see a popular, influential figure help tell a story about autism that kept the focus where it belonged. In his beautiful interview with Ron Suskind, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart pointed out what should be obvious, but which gets very little play in the “awareness” community: having autism is mainly hard on the people who have autism.

Suskind, the Pulitzer-winning political author whom you may remember as the guy whom the Obama administration wasn’t all that happy with a few years back, appeared on The Daily Show to promote his new book, “Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism,” which focuses on Suskind’s son, Owen. There are two remarkable things about this interview, the first being that Stewart and Suskind actually make Owen’s experience with autism the focal point of the discussion, rather than Owen’s effect on the people around him. The other is the clip that Stewart plays at the conclusion of the interview, of the graceful adaptation Owen has made to connect with his father.

Through my writing about autism and the media, I’ve cyber-met many parents of children with autism who have their priorities straight, but it’s been my experience that they are the minority. In real life, I’ve never met an autism parent who didn’t want to bitch about how hard it is on their own lives, or trade pats on the back over our mutual suffering. I’m sorry, but if you have a child with autism, and your first thought every day isn’t how hard it is to have autism in a neuro-typical world, then you are failing at life.

That’s nothing, though, compared to the treatment of autism in the media. Aside from the toxic anti-vaccination crowd, which has made autism its favored Macguffin, the mainstream media has engaged in a relentless campaign of slander against people with autism. When it was revealed that the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass murderer had an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (along with unidentified mental health issues), every single news outlet reported, without a shred of scientific basis, that the autism either may have been, or was, responsible for that crime.

Even before that, though, there were efforts to connect autism with mass murderers who weren’t even on the spectrum. Leading that effort was MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who tried to pin the Aurora movie theater shooting on autism, and said that “more often than not,” mass shooters are “somewhere on the autism spectrum.” At that time, the total number of mass shooters who had ever had a confirmed diagnosis of an ASD was precisely zero. Scarborough offered a non-apology that was exposed for the hollow excuse that it was when he fairly gloated at the news of the Newtown shooter’s diagnosis, and made the assertion again.

What makes Scarborough’s slander that much more sickening…READ MORE

By: Tommy Christopher

Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.