Representation of Older People in Media

 Media often portrait the older people as vulnerable and burden in the society, and makes the negative stereotype of older people as being poor, forgetful, antisocial, incapable of work, in ill health, difficult, and grumpy.

In the modern industrial society, some of magazines and advertisers give a message in their content that signs that growing old is bad.

The cosmetics and treatments now available to disguise signs of ageing. Media advertising of products and services that focus on such aspects of aging as memory loss, frailty, incontinence, and loss of mobility

There are some research about the negative stereotype towards older people.

·         Biggs (1993)’s research found that older people were represented in the media TV sitcoms as being forgetful and difficult

·         Cuddy and Fiske (2004) showed that in the US TV, there are only 1.5% of elders out of all characters and most of them has minor roles and appeared as a joke and has ineffective mental, physical;, and sexual capacities.

In the other hand, older men are more likely to be portrayed positively than older women. Women usually admired more based on their looks, so they usually gone from industries to when they reach the older age.

Women segregation in media has been found across all age groups, in fact Dr. Linda-Marie Delloff has found that “Elderly women are shown much less on Television then elderly men, only one in ten characters over 65 is a woman”

The stereotype of the older people may be introduced to the teenage who see older people as the burden and useless to children. There are several cartoon that represent the adult who are stereotyped as grumpy, idiot, or ‘evil parent who hate or does not care to their children’.

Disney’s animated movies, for the example, other than argued has negative stereotype of gender, also often to represent the older people’s negative stereotype, as either the villain, burden of the heroes or heroines, or dead. Cinderella’s and Snow White’s step-mother, Cruella de Vil, Madam Mim, Captain Hook, etc. are the example of these evil-older-people, which also dominated by adult women.

Overall, most of the Disney’s animated movies are have the negative stereotype towards the older people. This is not entirely good because the children may develop to think that they are always right and most of the elders are wrong.

And there are characters portrayed in the media more to negative stereotype, rather than positive stereotype, such as :

·         King of Queens (TV show) :  Arthur ( the father of Carrie) does not understand what is going on at all. Carrie and her husband Doug repeatedly say something but he seems to be in his own world and acts like a lost child.

·         Everybody Loves Raymond (TV show) : Marrie is portrayed as a stay at home grandma. In some scene, she is baking and then confronted by her daughter in law for needing to see an optometrist (someone who provide health care for visual problem), while  her own husband makes a joke about her poor vision.

·          Gran Torino (Movie) : Walt Kowalski is portrayed as a grumpy elderly person because of his experience during Korean War and believes the new  generations lack values his generation did (this film also dealt with racism)

Ageism is Prejudice or discrimination against a person age, and one of the example of consequences for the negative representation of the media. The prejudice  makes the negative assumption in media’s society, thus caused stereotyping toward older people.

Stereotypes affect the behavior of older adults in an everyday context. For example, negative stereotypes may not only affect the medical problem regarding an older adult illness, such as not receive enough medical care, but may also affect the older person's develop self-fulfilling prophercy, and caused older people doesn't want more medical care because of his or her own stereotypes about normal aging.

However, some researches found that the negative representation of old people may become lesser in recent years in the media to avoid the insulting the important role of older people as the part of the audience.

This is because the older people nowadays are the generation when baby boom happened and they have disposable income from savings, pensions, and investments so are significant market for media industries.

For the fictional characters, Albus Dumbledore (from Harry Potter), Gandalf the Gray (from The Hobbit), and Obi-Wan Kenobi (from Star Wars) shown as wise and brave in their own film, even though not all society acknowledge them. There are also films that portrayed older characters with both compassion and respect

And there are the real older people who seen as successful person, such as Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch whose are successful business people and Nelson Mandela, who are successful religious and political leader

How to prevent media’s impact on ageism :

*   Public must be more aware to use any content about older people in the media

*   When watching any media source and elderly are misrepresented and if someone is around, tell him/her why it is not an accurate representation of older adults

*   Social security for the elderly must be stronger

*   Use more positive representations of the elderly in media (television, movies, magazines, posters, ads etc)

*   Campaigns about the media’s influence on ageism

 “People will try to label you not good enough, too slow, too old, too many mistakes. You can’t stop negative comments or prevent negative labels, but you can choose to not let them hold you back.”— Joel Osteen

Reference :

·         https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK83767/

·         https://www.slideshare.net/ellesullivan310/as-lesson-9-old-age

·         http://www.aplaceformom.com/blog/14-18-4-aging-myths-dispe lled/

·         http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-458808/Disneys-villains-children-negative-images-elderly.html

·         http://psyc3490m.blogspot.co.id/

·         https://www.images.google.com/

·         Sociology’s IGCSE textbook