GBO NEWS: News Fellowship Deadlines; Economist’s Billion Shades of Ageism
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
May 22, 2014 — Volume 14, Number 8
Editor’s Note: GBO News, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generation publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. If you receive the table of contents as e-mail, just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org.
IN THIS ISSUE: Memories in the Corners of Your News.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE – FELLOWSHIP APPLICATIONS: 2014 Journalists in Aging Fellowship Deadline, July 1; ***Health Journalism Workshop on Rural Health, Travel Grant Deadline, May 28
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: “One Death Too Many” – An AP Reporter’s Story Behind a Story
3. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL: Thomas Piketty and The Economist’s “Billion Shades” of Ageism
4. THE STORY BOARD: “More Seniors Going Into Retirement Shouldering Mortgages, Feds Say,” by Pamela Yip, Dallas Morning News; *** “Recession Leaves Ethnic Families ‘Beyond Broke,’” by Paul Kleyman, New America Media; *** “For Many Boomer Immigrants, Rough Times Ahead, by Chris Farrell, ” PBS’ Next Avenue (also New America Media); *** “Do Not Resuscitate: What Young Doctors Would Choose,” by Paula Span, New York Times, “New Old Age” blog; *** “Healthy Aging Into Your 80s and Beyond: 5 Keys to a Long, Healthful Life,” by Liz Seegert, Consumer Reports; *** “’Silver Tsunami’ And Other Terms That Can Irk The Over-65 Set,” NPR Morning Edition, Ina Jaffe and Renée Montaigne; *** AND the “Journalists Exchange on Aging Survey on Style,” a timely reminder about our 2007 GBONews Special Report on the language of aging.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE – FELLOWSHIP APPLICATIONS
***The Journalists in Aging Fellows Program, run jointly by The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) and New America Media (NAM) is now accepting applications for its fifth year. The program, done in cooperation with the Journalists Network on Generations (publisher of GBONews.org), is continuing thanks to new funding from AARP. The previous program sponsor was the MetLife Foundation, which no longer funds programs in aging.
For the past four years, this co-venture — responsible for more than 200 news stories by 65 alumni to date — has largely centered around GSA’s Annual Scientific Meeting and in-depth stories proposed by each fellow. In 2014, the addition of a series of regional briefings and telebriefings will keep many reporters engaged on the generations beat year-round. The 2014-15 group will include 13 fellows. Sponsoring one will be the John A. Hartford Foundation, now in its third year supporting the program. Roughly half of the fellows will be selected from general-audience media and half from ethnic media outlets that serve communities within the United States. The application deadline is July 1, 2014.
The centerpiece of the program will be the fellows’ participation in GSA’s Annual Scientific Meeting, from Nov. 5-9, in Washington, D.C. Fellows will deliver a story stemming from research at the conference, plus a major in-depth piece or series in the following months. The conference draws 4,000 experts in aging from around the world who present hundreds of talks and papers on more than 50 subject areas in aging. On arriving in Washington, the fellows will participate in a seminar the day before the full GSA conference begins. The session will showcase research highlights from the meeting and host discussions with veteran journalists on how to position aging stories in the current media environment.
A selection committee of journalists and experts in aging will review applications. Criteria include clarity and originality of proposed in-depth story projects; quality of samples of published or produced work; and high-impact potential of proposals geographically and across different ethnic or racial populations. A group of previous fellows also will receive travel grants to attend the meeting in Washington to cover the newest developments in aging. Applications details are online are posted at http://tinyurl.com/mfr7gfs. A continuously updated list of stories from the fellows is available at www.geron.org/journalistfellows.
***Health Journalism Workshop on Rural Health: “Rural Health Landscape: Meeting the People, Meeting the Challenges” is the theme of a no-fee workshop by the Association of Health Care Journalists (ACHJ) set for Portland, Ore., June 6. The Application deadline is May 28, and travel grants are available. See this website for details. Some sessions—reporter-moderated with experts from around the country–will examine developments in telemedicine, the impact of the Affordable Care Act and the cost of poor oral health. A workshop titled “The Aging of Rural Physicians and the Next Generation of Care” will focus on rural America’s” “significant physician shortage, likely to get much worse due to the graying workforce.”
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS
“One Death Too Many” – An AP Reporter’s Story Behind a Story: The Associated Press’ Matt Sedensky has earned a well-deserved reputation as a solid reporter on aging since he took on the AP’s generations beat six years go. But GBONews was especially stuck by his rich and impassioned storytelling in a profile published earlier this month “For Hospice Nurse, Wife’s Death Was 1 Too Many” (as headlined in the San Francisco Chronicle). This editor was curious about how the feature, which doesn’t have an obvious news hook and involves a Los Angeles subject by the Miami-based Sedensky, came about. His brief reply argues both for the continuity of beat reporting and the diligence of old-style news-hounding in our digital age. Here’s his lead (or “lede” for leading-edge boomers and more seasoned reporters):
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jay Westbrook’s cowboy boot is planted firmly on the gas pedal of his shiny black pickup. Everywhere he turns, a memory flashes. In Van Nuys, it is the lifeless little girl he held at Valley Presbyterian Hospital after she was found in the bottom of a hot tub. Near Beverly Hills, outside a Wilshire Boulevard high-rise, it is the old woman in a seven-figure condo whose misery he tried to soothe. On Skid Row, it is the 29-year-old crack addict he brought morphine to numb the pain of cancer, as she died in a box on the street. There have been thousands of them, thousands of souls he journeyed with to the intersection of living and dying, who helped establish him as one of the foremost experts on care in a patient’s final days . . . It might have gone on this way forever, the never-ending string of deathbed confessions and last breaths and tear-soaked eulogies. Then came one death too many.”
That was the death two years ago of Nancy, Westbrook anchor and love story of his life.
As with other gen-beat writers, Sedensky met Westbrook, clinical director of Compassionate Journey, when the hospice expert was a frequently speaker at American Society on Aging professional conferences. Sendensky, who first heard Westbrook about five years ago, recalled, “I thought he was such a powerful speaker. I knew he had potential for a story someday, but didn’t see any immediate impetus for one.”
Fast-forward to Sedensky’s trip to Los Angeles last fall. He e-mailed GBONews, “I had a few days there, and as I was doing last-minute planning for the trip, a number of my other ideas on people to meet and stories to pursue fell through. Looking for ideas for people to meet with, I went through a stack of business cards and found Jay’s. I reached out to him and we had breakfast in West Hollywood. Hearing of his wife’s passing and learning of his tortured backstory really made me think there was a good opportunity to share his story. I went back and spent three days with him a couple months ago for the resulting story.”
An emotional memory of someone once met and a five-year old business card – continue (the Internet aside) among the essential tools of our trade. If you have a few minutes, read Sedensky’s evocation of the spirit of the gen beat.
3. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL
***A Billions Shades of Income Inequality and Ageism: “Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, has done a remarkable job of focusing public attention on the growth of inequality in the last three decades and the risk that it will grow further in the decades ahead,” wrote economist and “Beat the Press” blogger Dean Baker, in an op-ed for Truthout.
Such a broad spectrum of non-economists is alarmed enough by widening income inequality that Piketty’s doorstop of an economic text has become the No. 1 U.S. bestseller. And it’s an issue of growing concern to anyone trying to understand the deepening threat to those who are most vulnerable in American society—women, minorities, the very young and the aging. Complaints about the French economist’s “socialistic” treatise (which isn’t) are plentiful enough from the right.
Actually, though, Piketty’s meticulous work is so respected that some conservative sources, such as The Economist, have cited parts of his discussion to update their own arguments. (More about this latter.) But the left hasn’t been uncritical, either. GBONews was struck by the Baker’s article and his longer overview of Piketty’s thesis, because it offers journalists a sign post for more equitable solutions to our economic disparities—at least practical questions about where our upward-skewed economy (to the 1%) might find balance—besides rightist proposals to slash “the welfare state” for our “grandchildren’s” future.
Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, goes on to address: “What can be done to offset this tendency towards rising inequality? Piketty’s answer is that we need a global wealth tax (GWT) to redistribute from the rich to everyone else. That is a reasonable solution if we’re just working out the arithmetic in this story, but don’t expect many politicians to be running on the GWT platform any time soon.”
Baker offers a short list of the kinds of policies the United States could pursue “that would lower profits to the benefit of the vast majority of the population.” For instance, he suggests ending what he discusses as wasteful inefficient subsidies to the telecommunications, pharmaceutical, travel and other industries. By doing so, says Baker, “unlike pure redistributionist measures like taxing the rich, we would have a larger pie that would even allow for some buying off of the losers.”
Even for generations-beat writers not immersed in picayune economics, this short op-ed can be helpful in exposing several areas of innovation and challenges to current budget-bound solutions – such as balancing national books by slashing entitlement spending, as proposed this week in major American media, such a “Charlie Rose,” by a two top editors of The Economist.
*** The Economists Shady Billions: The cover line a recent issue of The Economist (April 26-May 2) headlined “A Billion Shades of Grey” gives a nod to the fact, reported inside, that by 2035, 1.1 billion people age 65 or older will walk the globe. When I mentioned to a friend this week that the article blames old people for all the woes of the world, she, an author, editor and seasoned communications authority on aging, was understandably skeptical.
However, the cover copy that hovers over a black-and-white photo of an older couple shown from behind, settled on a seaside bench gazing horizon-ward across the water, comically, but surely affirms to two related articles in the magazine. The man, his cap tilted a jaunty angle, is saying, “Thanks to us oldies, the world economy is threatened with secular stagnation, China’s prospects are deteriorating and inequality is rising.” His spouse replies, “That’s nice dear.”
Inside, a “Leaders” editorial declares, “An ageing economy will be a slower and more unequal one—unless policy starts changing now.” And a three-page analysis–ominously headlined “Age Invaders”–seems at first to depart sharply and explicitly from the well trodden and amply funded conservative messaging of the past three decades. In both essays, the unsigned “Economist” articles boldly reject “the dire consequences of a ‘grey tsunami.’”
As for the lack of bylines, ever protruding a stiff-upper air of unarguable authority, that anonymous conceit evidently gives way to the prestige of a book cover. This week The Economist’s Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait (noted in his Amazon bio line as a former Chase Manhattan banker), and the publication’s Management Editor Adrian Wooldridge, were making the media rounds on this side of The Pond to flog their new text, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State. (Penguin Press HC). On Monday (May 19), the pair told Charlie Rose that President Obama missed his opportunity to remake American politics (a major international theme of the book), not by dealing forthrightly with the foreclosure crisis and aching unemployment, instead of only shoring up the banks, but by – you’ve got it – wresting control of this nation’s ”entitlements.”
Political skittishness they surmise, caused Obama to set aside the Simpson-Bowles recommendations—referring to the entitlement and other austerity measures called for by the co-chairs of the president’s 2010 fiscal responsibility commission, which Obama then shelved. “Entitlements, Entitlements,” declared Micklethwait, reigning in the “welfare state,” that’s the answer to America’s future prosperity.
But their discussion and the “Shades” cover articles go beyond old-boy cries for cuts. Instead the magazine blots up contemporary developments of the technological era—the needed for more broadly available education, extended labor-participation by elders experienced enough for the information economy, robotic senior care in Japan, and so on—elements of progress often cited in reaction to conservative doomsayers. The analysis even supports its shaded perspective with a nod to Mr. Piketty.
The Economist’s examination of what is often called the Longevity Revolution is informative, but mainly about current thinking among global economic policy thinkers. What comes through, on closer examination, are the same old budget-obsessed intensions, which lurk well back in the more shaded paragraphs.
I don’t want to minimize the value of these two articles in sounding a warning that the left should pay attention to. A strength of the “Age Invaders” article is in its discussion of the elder economic divide. It projects a large, more affluent and middle-class bloc of seniors enjoying the benefits of longevity well enough to work longer—but without adding much to the national product.The Economist’s analysis is that are this group is likely to save more than it spends on economy-stimulating purchases, such as a home or new car.
Meanwhile, say the authors, the inequality divide between well-off and low-income elders would deepen, as impoverished and poorly educated older workers labor long and hard, until they’re waylaid by illness or disability–costly to their families and society. That is, the rich old will get richer, while the poor old will become poorer, and, says The Economist, with a long term drag on the U.S. and other national economies.
Yet, while the articles pose a significant dilemma grounded in current realities, the authors’ editorial offers no insight, no real innovative thinking about effective adaptations in economies. Only stale charges against entitlement spending, mainly on the old.
Their unrepentant financial framing hems the writers into conclusions that have been the mainstay of market-driven analyses for three decades. Even if one stipulates sincerity in their call for greater investment in education ‘at all stages of life”—a measure that was becoming increasingly evident with mounting research connecting shortened life-expectancy for people with lower education levels—others of their proposals simply echo longstanding policy prescriptions from advocates for the market economy.
Yes, age mandatory retirement ages and pension rules discouraging people from working longer, they say, “should go.” But does The Economist propose to shelve pension strictures that keep workers from taking partial pensions while still working part-time—opening them to being forced to do so by employers who’d only be too happy to get the same job done by the same employees, but at a much lower cost and without having to cover benefits?
And what exactly are they getting at in recommending, “Welfare should reflect the greater opportunities open to the higher-skilled”? Are they suggesting lower unemployment support, medical assistance and so on for people deemed by – what bureaucracy under what authority – depending on a person’s perceived ability to get out there and make a good living. Have these authors looked at who in the U.S., for example, has borne the brunt to long-term unemployment, regardless of skills level? (Hint – older workers.)
What about their urging to make pensions “more progressive,” that is, ”less generous to the rich” than for lower income workers? Social Security in the U.S. already does this somewhat. So how would The Economist’s authors ensure that public pensions, like Social Security, wouldn’t become “means-tested” like poverty program, like food stamps or Medicaid–easily cut over time by politicians seeking budgetary “savings”? Mean-testing of entitlement programs has long been a staple of policy hawks, but this article isn’t clear on what The Economist has in mind, leaving only skepticism about their intentions in the minds of many readers.
Then – oh, so predictably – The Economist lets it’s other Ferragamo shoe drop with this lament: “In America both Social Security and the fastest-growing disability benefits remain untouched by reform.” Ah, yes, the cry of “Save the Planet—Cut Entitlements” is as older in this country as Wall Street’s bitter attacks on FDR’s original plan in 1935.
But nowhere to be read in these pages are words of upgrading lower-end workers to living wages along with their better training and educational opportunities. Nowhere do they broach the issue of continued and unpunished banditry by, well, bankers that gave us the Great Recession, or even outrageous CEO compensation, now up to 300 times the pay of average workers. Nor is there any mention of potential innovations in productivity, such as by combatting workplace age discrimination.
Rather, The Economist rails at “Deadbeat 60 year older… caring for the growing number of very old people….” Why the denigrating language – and why not support serious reform of elder care, such as through decent pay and working conditions for those direct care workers who spend more time with elderly parents of the rich that their affluent kids do.
Well, perhaps Micklethwait and Wooldridge are more thoroughly evenhanded in the pages of The Fourth Revolution. Just perhaps they are full of truly refreshing policy solutions that are as economically and humanely effective, an impression not rendered by neither the cover story, nor their comments to Charlie Rose. Or possibly it’s just thick enough to give someone a chair boost to reach up for Capital in the 21st Century.
4. THE STORY BOARD
*** “More Seniors Going Into Retirement Shouldering Mortgages, Feds Say,” by Pamela Yip, Dallas Morning News (May 7). She writes, “Seniors are carrying more mortgages into their retirement years than in previous decades, according to a report released today by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For homeowners age 65 and older, the percentage carrying mortgage debt jumped from 22 percent in 2001 to 30 percent in 2011, the agency said. Among those 75 and older, the rate more than doubled during that same period, from 8.4 percent to 21.2 percent.” Yip’s article links to the CFPB study.
*** “Recession Leaves Ethnic Families ‘Beyond Broke,’”. (May 19) by New America Media’s Paul Kleyman (also GBONews editor) looking at the deep retirement-security disparity between also stressed white seniors and those from ethnic/racial communities. It reports on a new report, released this week, titled “Beyond Broke: Why Closing the Racial Wealth Gap is a Priority for National Economic Security,” and “Impact of the Great Recession and Beyond: Disparities in Wealth Building By Generation and Race.”
*** “For Many Boomer Immigrants, Rough Times Ahead,” PBS’ Next Avenue (also New America Media), by Chris Farrell (May 15). Aging immigrants in the U.S. can find later life rough. Often, their savings are low and family needs high. But some programs offer help.
*** “Do Not Resuscitate: What Young Doctors Would Choose,” by Paula Span, New York Times, “New Old Age” blog (May 20). V.J. Periyakoil, MD, a palliative care specialist at Stanford University, presented findings at the recent American Geriatrics Society meeting from the survey she headed of nearly 1,100 young physicians completing clinical training. “The researchers asked what choices they would make for themselves if they were terminally ill. Their reply: 88.3 percent would choose a do-not-resuscitate or ‘no code’ status,” Span reported. The piece concludes, “Dr. Periyakoil, who called her presentation ‘Do Unto Others,’ concluded with a slide that read: ‘Why do doctors continue to provide high-intensity care for terminal patients but may personally forgo such care themselves at the end of life?’” Span adds, “It’s a really good question.”
*** “Healthy Aging Into Your 80s and Beyond”: 5 Keys to a Long, Healthful Life” is Liz Seegert’s new piece in Consumer Reports (May 2014). Seegert, a New York-based health care journalists who edits AHCJ’s section on aging, observes that 60 years ago “an American who made it to 65 could expect to live an additional 14 years. Today, it’s 19 years. The most important question then: how to grow older healthfully so that we can actually enjoy those extra years?” Her article reports on a Consumer Reports survey of 2,066 Americans age 50 and older. It found, for instance, that “33 percent of those older than 80 have difficulty walking, and more than 25 percent have a tough time simply getting out of chairs, so a fitness plan that maintains strength, flexibility, and balance is vital. Our survey group told us that their current home was the top choice of where to live as they aged and needed more care. But the ability to do so is highly dependent on the home’s location and physical features.”
*** “’Silver Tsunami’ And Other Terms That Can Irk The Over-65 Set,” NPR Morning Edition, (May 19), was a conversation with NPR’s reporters on aging Ina Jaffe and “Morning Edition” Co-anchor Renée Montaigne about Jaffe’s examination of the language of aging.
She told Montaigne, “I realized what a minefield this was after I’d been on the beat just a few months.” Jaffe profiled a midwife, age 71, who’s be up all night delivering babies.” It appeared online under a headline she didn’t write, of course, describing the woman as “elderly.” Jaffe continues, “Listeners were furious. Maybe once upon a time, ‘elderly’ referred to a particular stage in life, but now people think … it means you’re ailing and you’re frail.”
The piece goes on, “Jaffe sometimes uses ‘older adults’ or ‘older Americans,’ she says, if it’s relevant to the story. ‘Sometimes I use the term “senior” — though I’ve met some older people who don’t like that, either. And “senior citizen” really seems to annoy just about everyone now. … There really aren’t a lot of widely acceptable terms anymore.’” In the segments (and for the written online story, which by the next afternoon had 415 comments), Jaffe discussed four terms, “golden years” (“a sales pitch from the late 1950s’); “our seniors” (“The only other group we talk about like that is children,” Jaffe says, “and I find it patronizing”); “successful aging” (“Although it is typically considered a progressive term, it drives Jaffe “crazy,” because, she says, “I think it just means there’s one more opportunity for me to fail”; and “silver tsunami.”
On silver tsunami, they interviewed writer Ashton Applewhite, who writes the blog, “This Chair Rocks” (Pushing back against ageism”), who hates the term. She commented, “A tsunami is something that strikes without warning and that sucks everything out to sea — as [if] we’re supposed to believe old people are going to suck all our resources out with them. In fact, the demographic wave that we’re looking at is an extremely well-documented phenomenon that is washing gently across a flood plain. It’s not crashing on some undefended shore without warning.”
***GBONews.org (when we were still called “Age Beat Online, Newsletter of the Journalists Exchange on Aging”) published an extensive discussion of the verbiage of generational coverage, in our 2007 special issue, “Journalists Exchange on Aging Survey on Style.” This editor based it on a survey we did with almost 100 journalists who covered aging regularly. It includes a two-page section, “Words to Age By: A Brief Glossary and Tips on Usage,” which you can find online. I’ll be happy to send GBONews readers the complete 14 page PDF (including he glossary) if you send me a quick note: pkleyman@newamericamedia.org.
If you have technical problems receiving issues of GBO News or if you’d like to be removed from the list, simply auto-reply to this e-mail of GBO News, or phone me at 415-503-4170 ext. 133 (e-mail: pkleyman@newamericamedia.org). GBO News especially thanks Sandy Close of New America Media, and our cyber-guru, Kevin Chan. The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online with in-kind support from New America Media (NAM). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. NAM is an online, nonprofit news service reaching 3,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States. GBO News readers are invited to visit the NAM website, and click on the Ethnic Elders section logo on the right side. Opinions expressed in GBO do not represent those of NAM. Copyright 2014, JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman. To subscribe of unsubscribe, or if you have technical problems receiving issues of GBO or if you’d like to be removed from the list, e-mail me at pkleyman@newamericamedia.org or phone me at 415-503-4170 ext. 133.