Peyton Gallovich and Dyan Sue Kovacs sign to each other in the Cronkite newsroom. Gallovich and Kovacs have been working together to start the Deaf and Hearing Network, which will air in January. (Photo by Murphy Bannerman)When Peyton Gallovich was a freshman at ASU, she had a dream one night that she bought out the Oprah Winfrey Network and started her own television network. Her network, however featured news, sitcoms and children’s shows that were done entirely in sign language.
Now, as a journalism sophomore, she is seeing her dream come to life with the creation of Deaf and Hearing Network, a news outlet accessible for the deaf, hard of hearing and hearing alike. DHN is set to make its first broadcast available in January.
“My teacher Dyan, she taught sign language in a way that I have never been taught before. She made it more than just vocabulary words. She made it have so much more meaning to me,” Gallovich said. “I thought, 'I want to work with her. I want to make DHN happen, and I want her to be my adviser.'”
In October, Gallovich set to work drafting the plans for a news broadcast that will have members of the deaf community signing local news, deaf-specific news and international news. While the anchors sign, there will be voice-overs and accurate captioning.
“If you ever watch live news like CNN or ABC, the closed captioning is not very good," she said. "It tends to have a very big lag — you’ll have fire on the screen and (the captions) will be talking about burglary. Your eyes are never reading what you’re watching.”
The trifecta of reading, hearing and seeing the news is important for making information available to many audiences, Gallovich said. These include families who have a mixture of hearing and deaf members and those who are hearing and learning the language.
While doing her research, Gallovich noticed that there are deaf news networks that are done entirely in sign.
“If you are a hearing person who doesn’t sign very well, you can’t really get too informed about the deaf community," she said. "So I kind of just decided — what if we meld the two together?”
Gallovich plans on covering topics that are relevant to the deaf community as well as topics that are relevant to all of Arizona.
“We already have offers to be on TV and to be in newspapers,” she said. “We have offers to have advertisements on the radio and online. People I have been talking to have been more than willing to donate their time, their ideas and their efforts, and we haven’t even done anything. We have done nothing whatsoever, and we already have people giving so much. What are we going to do when we have a product? We could really be something.”
Gallovich said she was inspired by how many people are willing to help make her dream a reality. People have donated space, equipment and their interpreting skills, and many have volunteered to help in whatever way they can to make DHN happen.
“Journalism is about changing one person. If we only impact the life of one person, then I’ll be happy,” Gallovich said. “Obviously, I want this to be amazing, and I want so much to come of it, and I want people to be begging to be involved, but if we can just inform one person, make it a little easier for one family to watch the news together, then I’ll be happy.”
History junior Ted Horton-Billard, who is deaf and grew up in a hearing family, liked the idea of a deaf and hearing news network, except for one aspect of it. He signed that it would be a lot of work for him to be reading closed captioning in English and watching sign at the same time.
“It would be natural to just have sign,” he signed. “Signing and subtitles may say the same thing but they are so different.”
American Sign Language and English have different word orders, so it is difficult to read one and watch the other at the same time, he added.
Earlier this week, Horton-Billard did see an ESPN broadcast about the football team at Gallaudet University, a deaf college in Washington, D.C. It was the first time he saw broadcast done with signing, voicing and closed captioning.
“I just watched the signing,” he signed.
When there is not someone using sign language on screen, Horton-Billard relies on closed captioning.
“I can’t live without closed captioning,” he signed. “Sometimes it’s wrong, and sometimes it skips. It’s very hard when it is live and the writers go back and correct. It’s better to have it prepared.”
Dyan Sue Kovacs is a sign language instructor at the Downtown campus. She explained that hearing people have everything when it comes to the news and that closed captioning only helps them understand more.
“If you have sign language, it helps deaf people reduce the lack of information," she signed. "Often times, during live news, closed captioning is behind spoken language. We miss the last minute of the news. With signing, we'll have full access to the news, which is very important for us. This concept will have a huge impact on the deaf community. I am very excited."
The anchors will be deaf students. While hearing students will be involved, they will not be anchors.
"It's important to have deaf people sign their own language," she signed. "Not often before have there been deaf anchors reporting the news."
There are a few challenges that they may face in the newsroom, including communication barriers or possible conflicts within the deaf community.
“I’m excited for the challenges,” Kovacs signed. “I want to see it grow.”
The network might not help hearing people understand deaf culture, but it will help hearing people understand that the deaf have their own language and their own knowledge, Kovacs added.
“Maybe we could impact the community to know that ASL is important to us all,” Kovacs signed. “Hearing and deaf.”
Reach the reporter at akcarr@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @allycarr2
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Gallovich's goals with the Oprah Winfrey Network.
