To create an accurate record of history, news organizations in 2025 must become serious about the disability beat by understanding and actively resisting ableism.

That’s more crucial than ever with an incoming president whose rhetoric falls in line with fascist logics and beliefs and whose appointees for various health positions ramp up chances for misinformation about disability to spread. Take Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services — someone who has promoted scientifically debunked conspiracies, from “vaccines cause autism” to “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.”

Disabled people make up the largest minority group in the U.S., with over 1 in 4 people self-reporting a disability in 2022. It’s also one of the most fluid: Anyone can become disabled temporarily or permanently at any point, and unfettered spread of COVID-19 continues to disable people.

But ableism in language and practice runs rampant. Intellectual disability is again being mocked as people in the Silicon Valley right like Elon Musk share racist pseudoscience around whether some races have higher IQs than others. Having a mental health diagnosis raises the likelihood of employment discrimination and a loss of legal autonomy.

Eugenics and ableism have historically gone hand in hand. Nazi Germany’s fascist campaign was propped up by eugenicist science that first began in the U.S. to cull “undesirable” populations, including disabled people. Early 20th-century eugenicists used terms like “imbecile” and “moron” to dehumanize intellectually disabled people, paving the way for involuntary segregation into abusive and neglectful institutions.

The U.S. is only now finally working to close a loophole that let employers pay some disabled people a subminimum wage — many of them intellectually and developmentally disabled. Last year, around 30% of disabled people lived at or below the poverty line.

And there are manifest improvements to be made within journalism. Many disabled staffers are freelancers. At The Sick Times, none of the four staffers are able to work full-time. Often-ableist industry expectations around job performance can prevent disabled journalists from holding staffer positions, and the crip tax — the term for the added costs of living with a disability — on top of sub-par wages in journalism, make the career even less sustainable, especially with the risk of further disability from COVID-19 infections in workplaces without precautions like cleaner air or masking requirements. Most of the full-time reporters covering disability are white, which can result in intersectional stories about disability across different races and ethnicities falling through the cracks.

Some newsrooms have started to acknowledge this history of ableism by covering and considering disability more seriously. The Washington Post has an accessibility engineer. WBFO (Buffalo’s NPR station), The New York Times, Mother Jones, and The 19th are among the outlets that have dedicated reporters or fellows to covering disabilities. The Sick Times, where I work as a podcast producer, is dedicated to covering long COVID and other infection-associated chronic illnesses.

IRE’s AccessFest, an all-virtual conference, is one effort aiming to retain the quality and access initially ushered in during early pandemic years. There’s now a guide around frames for reporting on how young disabled and chronically ill people use online spaces, too. And there are more efforts to create community among disabled journalists, including the burgeoning Disabled Journalists Association and Society of Disabled Journalists.

Style guides like the National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability Language Style Guide have provided an example for moving away from ableist language and encouraging a rejection of the long-standing journalistic pattern of stereotyping disabilities. But using the right language isn’t the the be-all and end-all of better disability reporting, says Emyle Watkins, the disability reporter at WBFO. While they’ve seen more interest in training around better disability coverage, “overall the thing I see in the media that really bugs me — all these outlets want to do the very, very bare minimum and get [just] the language right.”

“There is no dictionary for this,” they said. “We’re working with human beings…instead, train your employees to not be afraid to think about what ways they’re being ableist and…deeply understanding ableism.”

Ableism isn’t just about disability. It’s intimately connected to other forms of structural oppression and has always been.

If newsrooms want to cover that seriously, they must begin analyzing ableism seriously — across journalism’s culture, history, and frames. And that also means investing in the disability beat in 2025 and beyond, particularly by creating institutional support for disabled writers: “Nothing about us, without us” is true of newsmaking, too.