The Portrayal of the Elderly in the Media

The Portrayal of the Elderly in the Media


The media represents different things in many ways. One way that interests me is how elderly people are viewed and portrayed in the media. There are many stereotypes of older people in the media, there is also the difference in how female and male elderly people are viewed. Elderly men are often viewed as grumpy while some elderly women are shown as hostile; both are shown sometimes as lonely, depressed, poor, sick, wisdom, and coming back to life. Often in the newspaper and the news channels they show elderly people who are sick and cannot afford their healthcare, or they show them getting robbed or something else terrible. These clippings tend to construct an idea that elderly people cannot take care of themselves. It also has a tendency to make other people feel sorry for them.
With the recent financial crisis and the number of abuse of elderly people in nursing homes tends to make younger people feel sorry for them, while other shows depict elderly people as being angry, old, and not up to date on recent technologies and cultural practices. As like with any stereotypical depiction there is some sort of basis or truth. People find it easy to pity elderly people especially when it comes to social security, healthcare and other issues that effect them directly. With this angle also being shown in the media, it is hard to believe or hear about when an elderly person commits a crime or does something bad. There are hardly ever cases of when elderly people are the ones committing the crime or wrongful deeds. In many stories and literatures a lot of the elderly people also represent wisdom and are shown as very knowledgeable.
Elderly people are viewed a little differently in psychology than they are in the popular media. “More important, we can inform students confidently that most older adults are not lonely, isolated, sick and frail. Rather, the elderly live independently and maintain contact with their families. We also know, contrary to the depression myth, that community-dwelling older adults have lower rates of diagnosable depression than younger adults” (http://www.apa.org/monitor/aug98/aging.html) Some psychologists view aging as a good thing rather than a negative thing, which the media portrays. The number of elderly people is rapidly increasing yet the portrayal of them is still the same. Although some elderly people are sick with specific disorders because of old age not all elderly people are as helpless as the media portrays them to be. The discipline of psychology takes different approaches to the elderly depending on the context and area of psychology one is studying. However, the psychology discipline does take a much more humanistic and authentic view of the elderly and often views them with more respect and less sympathetic for them unlike the popular media.