Hopefully, by now you’ve had a chance to read my husband’s knee-jerk reaction to the Post’s August 18 article on Gallaudet’s goal to bring its football program back to the varsity level.

While his reaction is entirely appropriate, — and, in fact, similar to mine when I first saw the headline — I’d like to argue that CK shoots all his cannonballs at the wrong boat.

Yes, as someone who calls herself culturally Deaf, I feel sucker-punched whenever I see the term “hearing-impaired” in any form of media. But I don’t think using that term is the most offensive or harmful effect the article has.

The worst thing the article does, instead, is play off Gallaudetians’ inability to hear or our novelty-like language when it has absolutely nothing to do with the real story.

The author of the article, Alan Goldenbach is a prolific writer of many pretty well-researched and tight articles, as a casual Google search will reveal. Even a look at a awkwardly adorable 1997 pic from his UMich days makes it hard to stay pissed at him.

But we shouldn’t point fingers at Goldenbach. The article is actually beautifully written. It’s a nice, albeit brief, summary of the history of Gallaudet’s football program. It touches on the whole coach who can’t sign with a team of players who need a good coach who can sign situation. And, the mark of a good journalist, the article even manages to delve a bit into the dark Deafie world of twisted stories as it mentions briefly Andy Bonheyo’s success with the MSD football program and Gallaudet’s subsequent inability to reach a satisfactory settlement in order to recruit Bonheyo as the new head coach — according to an anonymous source, anyway (Go Orioles!).

In fact, if you take away the headline and the one mention of the term “hearing-impaired,” there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the article.

So who do we blame for the stupid headline? Goldenbach’s editors.

Let’s recap: the story is about the athletic department’s drive to breathe some life into a sagging program by aiming for varsity status. The secondary story, of course, is that they decided to do that by hiring a coach who’d never used his hands to say a thing in his life before (and no, flipping people the bird doesn’t count).

Does “A Show of Hands for Gallaudet Football” provide any real information as to what the story is about? No. So the editor (probably a copy editor) who made it up just flunked Journalism 101 and commited the serious social faux pas of saying “lookee lookee — there’s some people who can say things just by waving their hands around in the air! Cool! Let’s mention it in the headline… wow, doesn’t that sound poetic?!”

But then again… in journalism, flouncy, empty headlines are allowed IF, and ONLY IF, the sub-head has the real meat in it. “After 11 Years, School for Hearing-Impaired Tries to Revive Varsity Program.” Okay… I’ll give this one a C+. It does manage to mention Gally’s varsity aspirations. But it also shoots itself in the foot with the “school for hearing-impaired” bit. For one thing, Gallaudet doesn’t call itself a school for hearing-impaired. So that’s loss of accuracy right there. Secondly, Gally has been part of the DC community for, oh, umpteen-and-two years now. Why mention that it’s a deaf school when the real story is about the club program that wished it was varsity?

The online version has a neutral pic of the new coach chatting away. But the paper version really pissed me off. The first pic is ok. It’s a picture of Coach Ed Hottle’s hands signing “hard.” Since the story mentions the second-time-in-recent-memory controversy of hiring a coach who can’t sign at a school that has a history of deaf students raising hell over teachers who DO sign, albeit sloppily, that one’s permissible. But it also is only three by three inches on the front page.

The story jumps to the third page, where the first thing you see is a huge, billboard size picture bigger than anything else on the page. Guess what it’s of? Coach Hottle? No. Football players? Noooo. The athletic director? As if. It’s a shot of the back of offensive line coach Josh Levine’s head. The ONLY thing you see, once you get past his cool spiky do, is his hearing aids (and maybe, if you squint and turn your head 15 degrees to the left, a blurry silhouette of Coach Hottle). There’s nothing else in the picture. So what message does this picture send? Of course, nothing to do with football or the new coach. It just screams, “WARNING, WARNING, DEAF PEOPLE HERE!”

Even more infuriating: the caption reads, “…Levine, who is deaf, prepares for the upcoming Gallaudet football season with head coach Ed Hottle, background.”

How many things can you find wrong with this?
1) Unless preparing for a football season has anything to do with hair product, the pic doesn’t show anybody preparing for any season, football or wiffleball.
2) We obviously know Levine is deaf. The hearing aid shot rammed that down our throats.
3) It’s about time we saw the term “deaf” used. Why now?! Why not way back on page E1 when the editors were drooling over pretty wordage about hands in the air?

This shows serious oversights by the editor. For one, you’re supposed to use the same term(s) throughout the article. The Washington Post has it’s own stylebook. I know this, not just because I learned it in high school (high school, for gosh’s sakes!), but also because the Associated Press stylebook, which is a standard-setter in the industry, calls for using “deaf,” “partially deaf,” or “partial hearing loss. It specifically says “…do not describe an individual as disabled or handicapped unless it is clearly pertinent to a story. If such a description must be used, make it clear what the handicap is and how much the person’s physical or mental performance is affected.” The entry is also found under the heading “impaired.”

I won’t go into the whole “hearing-impaired” thing too much. It’s too tiring. After reading Tom Willard’s absolutely wonderful 1993 classic, “How to Write Like a Hearing Reporter,” I’ve learned to roll my eyes whenever media commits these boo-boos (reprinted on p. 38 in Bragg’s Deaf World, if you’re up for a fun read). In a nutshell, I hate “hearing-impaired,” but other people - deaf and hearing both - don’t. Whatever you call yourself is an individual decision, and it’s a shame when others don’t respect that decision. Furthermore, no one ever says it intending to insult, which means there’s a world of ignorance out there we’ve left to correct.

Most importantly, there’s a huge need for an umbrella term that’s easy to use and remember that will cover all people with a hearing loss without carrying any emotional connotation along with it. Nearly impossible, I think. Once we have it, then, we need to carry out a huge full-scale campaign, complete with celebrity spokespeople (does anyone know if Britney Spears will be free after her baby is born? How about Paris Hilton? Anybody? Just as long as it’s not Tom Cruise), to get media people to correctly use it, and to get them to quit capitalizing on Deafies and ASL in order to sell articles.

So, while I think my husband’s right for wanting to take the editorial staff of the Post out to the woodshed for what he calls a “lickin’” (Heck, I’d give them a lot more if I had the chance), I think taking advantage of what mainstream society perceives as us for sensationalist purposes is the greater sin.

Now, where’d I put my whip? It was next to my red pen and my AP Stylebook last time I saw it. CK…what’s that poking out of your back pocket?!