Hi friend,
The subject line of this email – Do plus-size passengers deserve a bigger seat on a plane? – is the title of an article in the Dallas Morning News in which I was quoted this week.
The
article itself is pretty stigmatizing, so click through at your own risk, but I want to give you a peek into the process of being quoted in an article like this one and why I chose to be part of such an otherwise-stigmatizing piece.
Slants and angles
The first thing to understand is that by the time reporters are looking for sources, the angle of the piece is already set. Discovering just how much modern journalism seeks experts to back up opinions or slants that have already been chosen was, honestly, depressing.
For example, I receive emails three times per day from a mailing list of journalists and writers seeking quotes from experts. One of the media outlets that uses that list is very centered in diet culture and is prolific, so five days per week, I'm seeing requests from them for experts to back them up on articles-in-progress like,
“Five fruits that can cause surprise weight gain – NEVER eat them”
or
“Nutritionists Say These Cottage Cheese-Pancakes Are ‘Macro-Friendly And Balanced’ For Weight Loss”
That is not a media outlet I'll ever be responding to. Not only are they openly awful, it's clear that they profit from pure investment in ‘90s-style weight-loss articles and aren’t going to be open to anything else.
Many other outlets aren't as open about their particular slant, but it's very rare to see journalists on these lists who are genuinely open. Most of the time, they just need a quote to fill in a blank spot in a piece, and they're looking for something that supports their employer's capitalistic, patriarchal, profit-at-all-costs needs.
So I skim a lot of emails and sites where journalists put out queries, but I don't often respond, since my views aren't exactly mainstream. But when I do, here's how it works.
How pitching works
Briefly, here's how pitching works:
1. A journalist puts out a query.
2. An expert like me responds with a pitch.
3. The pitch may or may not be used.
Here's the full pitch I sent to this journalist, with the sections he chose to use marked in bold letters:
As a passenger of size, airline travel is always fraught for me. Since I don't fit in a single airplane seat, flying is physically miserable, but I also get stares, loud sighs and rude comments.
I've made thousand-mile road trips and reserved venues within driving distance for events in part to avoid flying.
People in bigger bodies deserve the same ability to travel as thinner people. We don't tell people who are particularly tall or broad-shouldered that they don't deserve to fly. Discussions about what fat people do or don't deserve obscure the large issue: We don't consider big bodies to be as valuable, worthy or deserving as we do smaller bodies.
When we consider some bodies less worthy than others, we start blaming those less-worthy bodies for the way that they're mistreated, rather than blaming the people doing the mistreating. When a fat person sits next to you on an airplane, the reason you end up uncomfortable, too, is that airlines have chosen profits over their customers. It doesn't have to be this way.
Treating fat people well is an easy competitive advantage for companies. Southwest Airlines' customer of size policy makes flying easier for even people in very large bodies, and not only do we talk to each other about it, we talk to thinner friends and family members as well.
After using Southwest's customer of size policy for a recent cross-country flight, I've been talking them up to everyone. That positive publicity is more than balanced out by the small costs of taking some extra effort to be good to fat flyers.
Hopefully more airlines will see the financial advantages of offering flyers of every size an appropriate amount of room.
This particular journalist is an odd duck. As you can see if you click through to the
article itself, he has…shall we say, distinct opinions about fat people, and those opinions are very negative. That's unlikely to change.
And yet he not only used part of my pitch (which is very at odds with the rest of the piece) and gave me a chance to see the article before publication, but when I suggested that he remove an even more stigmatizing paragraph from the piece, he did so.
To be quoted or not?
This is often the calculation advocates and activists must use when we participate in mainstream media: Will the good I can do here outweigh (pun not intended) the negatives of being here?
In this case, I decided that the good of having one fat-positive perspective – that might lead a few readers to think more deeply about why fat people are treated the way they are – was worth being associated with such a stigmatizing article.
There's no right answer, and next time I might decide differently.
