But … As a deaf copy editor currently working at a newspaper with an all-hearing audience, here’s my journalistic point of view:

As a copy editor, my job is to take a reporter’s story and lay it out on a page in such a way that it catches the reader’s interest. I have to chase all of those eyes and try to attract their attention to each page. This means, for each story I lay out, I need to find an unique, attention-grabbing twist to include in the hed to make readers want to read a story a reporter just spent hours chasing and writing.

Whether I’m deaf or not, I might have written a headline for this story with ‘Deaf’ in it, because it’s one of the most surefire ways to catch eyes. Sadly to say, in today’s society, “Student denies raping classmate” can be a bit ho-hum. A lot of readers are going to glance at that and think, “nothing new, yet another rape story, same old, same old.” But, “Deaf rape suspect says he’s innocent” has a twist in it. Readers see “Deaf” with “rape,” and they go, “Oooh, this is new. I want to read this,” and they do.

A large part of the reason copy editors need to write compelling headlines is to not only draw eyes to the story, but also to the page in general, with all its ads. Advertisers pay to put their ads in front of readers, and the more readers we can get to look at a page, the more value advertisers feel they are getting for their money. Ad dollars pay for your morning newspaper, whether in paper or online form, and they pay for our paychecks. Newspapers and news Web sites can’t survive without ad dollars, and as a copy editor, it’s my responsibility to help attract those dollars.

Yes, journalists gain (and probably deserve) a reputation for being sensationalistic. Sometimes, in the chase for ad dollars and readers, we throw PC-ness and common sense to the wind. But, sometimes it can be unintentional. Keep in mind, copy editors are working on deadline and with limited hed space — sometimes I have to describe a story in two words, sometimes I get lucky and get space for five to seven words. It’s all dictated by the space left after ads are placed on the page, and by story hierarchy (top story gets a bigger hed size; bottom, smaller). So, on a tight deadline, I may have no more than a minute or two to scan the story and come up with a hed. Sometimes I hit the nail on the head, sometimes I bomb and commit a serious gaffe (a recent one prompted a volley of phone calls and letters to my editor!).

Whatever the story or people involved, whoever writes the headline is looking for something to make it unique. Deaf, blind, wheelchair-bound, Mexican, Chinese, Muslim, Jewish, pastor, politician, teacher … you name it, odds are the copy editor will pull that out of the story and play it up in the hed. Sometimes feelings get hurt, sometimes people get offended. But newspapers need the eyes and ad dollars, and a lot of the time, that’s all it comes down to.

Marlee Matlin is on the program for PC reasons as others have asserted.

Hilary: My statement did not exclude the reality of non-hearing or non-white people being served up as freaks in the entertainment industry. But the fact remains that the freaks are almost uniformly hearing.

Your statement, however sarcastic it may have been, holds more than true for me. It reminds me of that one scene in The Family Stone, where the deaf character Thad Stone is told at dinner by the mother of his hearing family, “You are more normal than any other…******* sitting at this table.” (Thanks to a participant at SeekGeo’s website for that citation.)

If hearing people can be freaks on television or in the newspaper, so can deaf people!

“I hope Marlee proves me wrong but how is she going to do difficult ballroom and latin dances when she can’t even hear the music. It sounds dangerous to me for her to be attempting this show.”

Ohhh… so Deaf people dancing is supposed to be dangerous??? What about Deaf people skydiving, rock climbing, and walking on fire - all of which I have done at one time or the other?

And frankly, I agree with Marlee… walking down stairs in high heels in infinitely more dangerous than ballroom dancing.

So does this mean that non-hearing and non-white people are not freaks?

I’m deaf, therefore, I’m a not a freak… I’m normal!

Woocha!

(Disclaimer: the above comment is meant to be entirely in jest, with liberal amounts of humor and sarcasm.)

The article quotes a Chilean-born actor, Cristián de la Fuente: “I guess they needed one Latino per show. They went down the list and said, ‘Let’s call Cristián.’ I don’t want to let them down.”

It seems to be a game that implicates actors from across the spectrum of minorities. Yet these particular actors are fully cognizant of what they’re getting into. People like De la Fuente and Matlin are also more than capable of pulling off this gig with a touch of class.

It could be tempting to dismiss “Dancing with the Stars” as an unrepentant freak show, and perhaps we should do just that. But so much on television is a freak show, and the freaks are almost exclusively hearing and white.