This is one of the reasons why activists have targeted the elimination of the “r-word.”
The negative valence of the epithet has splashed even more stigma backwards on the people who have been so labeled. News organizations don’t notice how odd it is that they have omitted the names of some of those in attendance, because they’re those people. We don’t mention those people; they don’t have names or histories.

There’s one more factor, at least in the U.S. In the past decade the government has enacted Privacy Rules regarding health care information. Because our lives have been medicalized, some important information about us is covered by these guidelines. These HIPAA guidelines are famously difficult to understand. For example, the list of people who use paratransit buses in our city is a “medical record”—coincidentally, this makes it more difficult to organize riders for better service. I think that the societal touchiness about HIPAA records may also be feeding into the silencing of names like Julie Petty and Ricardo Thornton.

In the realm of fail, I especially enjoyed (*note sarcasm*) that the New York Times felt it was important to talk about the name change of The Arc, which happened 20 years ago, but that it was not important to include the names of the self advocates.