GBO NEWS: Blaming the Old for Brexit; 2 Journalism Fellowship Deadlines; ‘ProPublica’s’ Pharma Exposé; Guardianship Trap; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
June 27, 2016 — Volume 16, Number 10
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. You can subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge simply by sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. You’ll receive the table of contents as e-mail, just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org.
In This Issue: “No, mates,” I said go for the brisket, not the Brexit!”
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: ***Journalists in Aging Fellowship Deadline, July 29 ($1,500 and a trip to New Orleans); ***National Cancer Reporting Fellowships Deadline, Aug. 26 (4 days at NIH).
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Rural Aging Series Wins SPJ Region 10 Award for Tacoma (Wash.) Spokesman-Review team; ***Tommy Goldsmith Retires from Raleigh’s News & Observer.
3. WHY BREXIT? BLAMING OLD PEOPLE: “Brexit and Europe’s Angry Old Men,” by Jochen Bittner, New York Times
4. GOOD SOURCES: ***Just Care website (“The Buzz for Boomer and Carers”); *** “Transforming Retirement” conference on university retirement programs, August in Seattle; Generation Bold Radio.
5. THE STORYBOARD: *** “Feed Me, Pharmacy: More Evidence That Industry Meals Are Linked to Costlier Prescribing” by Charles Ornstein, ProPublica; *** “AGING IN THE FIELDS” series on migrant farm workers aging in California by David Bacon, Capital & Main/New America Media; *** “THE GUARDIANSHIP TRAP” by Emily Gurnon, Journalists in Aging Fellowship series, PBS Next Avenue; *** “Reporters Learn Future of Work and Aging During Columbia Seminar,” by Richard Eisenberg, PBS Next Avenue.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** The Journalists in Aging Fellows Program is Accepting Applications for its seventh year. The fellowship includes a $1,500 stipend, plus an all-expenses-paid trip to New Orleans to attend November’s Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). The project is a collaboration between GSA and New America Media (NAM), with support from the Journalists Network on Generations (publisher of GBONews.org). Reporters from all media types will be selected by a panel of journalists and gerontologists from both mainstream and ethnic media outlets serving communities within the U.S. (in any language).
The application deadline is Friday, July 29.
Both staff reporters and freelancers are welcome. Applicants must include a one-to-two page story proposal for a series, package or magazine-length piece to be published or broadcast by Spring 2017. Each fellow chosen must also write or produce a shorter initial article on any topic in aging (not requiring an advance story pitch) to run within weeks of the conference.
In it’s first six years, this fellowship has generated more than 400 news stories by 102 alumni. GSA, a nonpartisan, non-lobbying multidisciplinary association focuses on research from the widest possible spectrum of academic, nonprofit, public and private participants. The fall conference’s 4,000 attendees from all over the world — not just the United States — represent expertise on just about every subject area in aging under the sun, an encyclopedic roster of sources for journalists. To date, funders of this year’s program include the Silver Century Foundation, AARP, Retirement Research Foundation, and the John A. Hartford Foundation.
The program is co-directed by Todd Kluss, GSA’s senior manager of communications, and GBONews Editor Paul Kleyman, also senior editor of NAM’s ethnic elders newsbeat and national coordinator of the Journalists Network on Generations.Those with questions can contact Paul at NAM: (415) 503-4170 ext. 133; e-mail: pkleyman@newamericamedia.org, or Todd at GSA, (202) 587-2839; tkluss@geron.org. A continuously updated list of stories from the fellows is available at www.geron.org/journalistfellows.
*** National Cancer Reporting Fellowships will have an Aug. 26 applications deadline. A collaboration between the Association of Health care Journalists (AHCJ) and the National Cancer Institute, the program will select up to 15 journalists to spend four days on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., in October.
The training’s aim, says the AHCJ website, is to increase reporters’ “understanding of and ability to report accurately on complex scientific findings, provide insight into the work of cancer researchers and to better localize cancer-related stories.” Besides meeting frontline researcher in their labs, fellows “will learn of obstacles to care and disparities in access. They will understand how clinical trials work and how they are evolving. They will learn how to use online tools in their reporting, as well as taking close looks at such topics as genomics.”
Candidates should be professional journalists working in the United States. The program covers training expenses, travel and lodging, membership fees and most food costs. AHCJ’s Ev Ruch-Graham is the person to contact with questions: ev@healthjournalism.org or 573-884-8103.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS
***The Tacoma (Wash.) Spokesman-Review’s Series on Rural Aging by Erica Curless and Tyler Tjomsland took second place for health reporting for large dailies in the recent Excellence in Journalism contest held by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ Region 10, covering the Pacific Northwest).
Curless, a staff reporter, published the project in 2015 supported by a NAM-GSA Journalists in Aging Fellowship. and with AARP sponsorship. She often teams up with photographer and writer Tjomsland, who is a 2016 Fellow in the program. He’s working with Curless on a series about the aging of migrant farmworkers in Eastern Washington.
The rural aging project ran last summer as a three-parter in the Spokesman-Review and was adapted by New America Media for a national audience in two parts headlined “Old and Off the Grid–Facing Cancer in the Rugged Northwest,” and “Town Copes With Retirement Trend of Friendly But Sparse Rural Living.”
Curless, allowed, “We got beat for first place by [Portland’s] Oregonian and its amazing investigative piece on the salmonella cover up by the government and Foster Farms. So we were in good competition.” That story, “A Game of Chicken,” was by the Oregonian’s Lynne Terry. If you read it, follow up with a tasty vegetarian lunch.
The SPJ release noted that their contest “is the largest of its kind in the nation, with 2,300 entrants and 150 categories. SPJ’s Region 10 covers some of the least populated areas of the United States, among the area’s most densely populated, and everything in between to be found in Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon.
***Tommy Goldsmith Has Retired from the daily grind at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., after covering the age beat and other stories for many years. He e-mailed, “I am taking a buyout, but will continue to be involved in reporting on aging and health issues, initially through the North Carolina Health News site.” He’s also lined up gigs in the area as a bluegrass musician.
3. WHY BREXIT? BLAMING OLD PEOPLE
“Brexit and Europe’s Angry Old Men,” an op-ed in Saturday’s New York Times was only one of the more visible shadows of finger-pointing since the unnerving passage of England’s British Exit vote last week. The article’s author, Jochen Bittner, a political editor for German weekly, Die Zeit, reflected the common blame-game heard around the internet for an otherwise distressing but historically complex development. Fault-finding in lieu of actual analysis, of course, is an understandable, although tried-and-false political instinct. And the shadows of blame fall readily and long across popular attitudes.
As this editor perused the magazine rack at City Lights Books here in San Francisco, Saturday afternoon, a well-dressed graying woman standing near me said to her husband, “They’re saying the older ones went for it.”
But why old people, especially aging white males? Bittner cites polling figures probably cribbed from the Princeton Election Consortium breakdown showing that 58 percent of those 65-plus voted to leave the European Union, versus only 24 percent among those 18-24.
He and others in the chatter-sphere latched on to this age-based data without actually noting that the “Leave” vote rose pretty steadily up the age charts. For instance, from the youth vote of about one in four, the anti-EU balloting among Brits ages 25-49 jumped to 39 percent and for those 50-64 up to 49 percent, before reaching 58 percent high among pensioners.
Bittner ardently concludes, “The angry old men will not be mollified, their xenophobia cannot be controlled of channeled into constructive cooperation. We the young, the future of Europe, must push back. Too much time has been lost already.”
To be sure the tight 52-48 percent Leave victory (oddly termed “decisive” on Sunday’s “Weekend Edition” by NPR political pundit Mara Liasson) will be unsettling on a number of scores, not the least of which will likely be continued turmoil in global markets and their effects on things like retirement accounts (mine included). The plain fact, though, is that a million plus votes out of 35 million, while a clear majority, means that only a shade less than half of Britains said, “Remain.” That reality is already figuring into the discussion across Europe that will affect how the changes ahead will unfold.
Perhaps, there’s reasonable justification for anger toward the presumed bloc of narrow-minded, anti-immigrant old Englishmen. (I’m yet to see the older vote figures for Northern Ireland, Scotland and the City of London, which sharply voted to continue in the EU.) The image of those senior Brits can easily remind us in the U.S. of the older white Southerner males, over six-in-10 of whom voted against Barack Obama. But, also, age in politics does include people like, say, Bernie Sanders, 74, or Hillary Clinton, 69. Anyone remember the ‘60s?
More to the point, neither Bittner nor several other commentators I’ve seen have questioned what might lie behind the steady age rise of Brexit voters disaffected with EU membership beyond this ageist slant—and I do mean scapegoating.
What exactly is the point of Bittner’s railing against a demographic group he will join in only seven years? While placing himself among “we the young,” Bittner says he was born in 1973. While he disparagingly contrasts the 50-plus Brexit vote with that of those 18-24, Bittner fails to place himself in the 25-49 cohort that went four-in-10 for egress from the EU. Bittner may feel his youthful vigor, but at 43, he is middle-aged by any definition.
Sure, the age difference in voting is an important factor, but what’s the point of anyone screaming at older people? Such cacophony merely distracts from the real issues of myopic power. Far more apt, I believe, was Friday’s rare instance of agreement on the PBS News Hour by liberal syndicated columnist Mark Shields and conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Brooks commented, “As much as I hate…the fact that the U.K. is going to leave the EU, the elites in some large degree brought this on themselves. There was built into the European unification project an anti-democratic, a condescending and a snobbish attitude about popular democracy.”
Stating that he’s “pro-immigration,” Brooks notes how poorly the EU has handled the overflow of refugees into Europe.. He goes on, “A little humility is in order on the part of the establishment, frankly, that we have flooded the system with more than it can handle. And, secondly, we have not provided a good nationalism, a good patriotism that is cosmopolitan, that is outward-spanning, and that is confident. And, therefore, a bad form of parochial, inward-looking Trumpian nationalism has had free rein.”
Shields observed, “I think the forces and the advocates of globalization have been primarily obsessed with the well-being of the investor class and the stockholders and the shareholders, and been indifferent, oftentimes callous, to the dislocation and the suffering that people in countries affected by this trade, the expanded trade, the larger economy, who have been victimized by it. And it has been a accompanied, I think, by an elitist condescension, in many cases, and it’s been taken advantage of.”
I’m often reminded of what the late and wonderful Oakland Tribune publisher Robert Maynard, who was the only African American metropolitan newspaper owner until his death from cancer, would say. Every reporter needs to filter all stories through the prism of class, race, gender, geography and generation.
As for the Brexit vote, old people, while their Leave vote needs to be better understood, are not the problem; myopia is.
–Paul Kleyman
4. GOOD SOURCES
***Just Care (“The Buzz for Boomer and Carers”) is a website kicked off early this spring aiming to make “health advice fun and easy to understand for boomers, older adults and care providers.”
Just Care gathers helpful advice and interesting data from experts, consumer organizations and government agencies that focus on health and financial issues facing boomers and their parents. They focus on providing reliable information in a direct and lively style with an emphasis on often hard-to-find material scattered around the internet and separating it from the huge amount of misinformation.
Among recent posts have been Archer’s commentary on John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” dissection of “Debt Buyers.” John Oliver explains how easy it can be for people to set up companies that buy debt for collection from banks and other lending institutions and violate people’s rights with abusive collection calls. She also link to the program on YouTube.
The site’s team of contributors also posts practical pieces, such as “Five tips to relieve caregiver strain” (June 14) by Julie Potyraj. Archer, who founded the Medicare Rights Center in the late 1980s, is an independent consultant currently serving on the Board of Consumer Reports and the Benedict Silverman Foundation.
Among Archer’s recent postings was “Expand Social Security, don’t means test it,” (June 16). She offers a concise answer countering the intuitive statements rising in this election cycle that millionaires shouldn’t be getting government retirement funds they don’t need, while Social Security ought to be targeted to those needing help the most. It’s an argument GBO’s editor has heard in the last two weeks both from conservatives and progressives. But, as Archer explains, there’s something very wrong with that picture.
She states, “Make no mistake, expanding Social Security promotes retirement security; means-testing Social Security puts it at risk.” Agree or not, reporters covering Social Security need to consider both sides of this conflict to help readers get why some feel this way and others believe Social Security should be expanded, such as to offset the higher health costs of middle and lower income seniors and better support lower-income seniors, especially women and ethnic elders.
She notes, “More than 90 percent of benefits go to people with annual incomes under $50,000.” And half have incomes under $24,150, she writes. Also, in fact, the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research calculated that only 2.3 percent of Social Security benefits go to those earning $100,000 or more.
Archer continues, “Reducing or eliminating Social Security benefits for people of wealthier means–‘means testing’ Social Security–may sound reasonable in theory, but it would save almost no money if it applied only to the wealthiest Americans.”
She goes on, “Social Security gains its strength from being inclusive and protecting everyone who pays in ‘against the hazards and vicissitudes of life,’ as Franklin D. Roosevelt posited. A progressive tax system is a better way to ensure that everyone contributes their fair share, not means testing”–which could well undermine it as a poverty program.
*** “Transforming Retirement: Re-Writing Life’s Next Chapter” is the theme of a conference that may be of interest to generations-beat reporters in the Seattle area. It will be the annual meeting of the Association of Retirement Organizations in Higher Education (AROHE). It is set for Seattle, Aug.14-16.
These are university groups working to help retired faculty and other staff “beyond the campus.” That includes helping them with personal retirement issues and enabling many to connect with volunteer or other activities.
College/university retirees are often offered opportunities to continue filling in with part-time work. The AROHE brochure suggests one of the group’s purposes is “to lead the charge to change institutional and cultural attitudes.”
This year’s keynoter will be Fernando Torres-Gil, who headed the U.S. Administration on Aging in the first Clinton Administration. Among his many academic positions, Torres-Gil is director of UCLA’s Center for Policy Research on Aging. To request a complimentary media pass, contact AROHE President Patrick C. Cullinane, pcullinane@berkeley.edu; 510-420- 0415.
*** “Generation Bold: The Fountain of Truth” is a radio hour that opens with a sprightly jingle titled, “We’re Inappropriate for Our Age.” The show runs on weekends or, of course, perpetually in cyberspace. On air it currently broadcasts interviews with experts and on various aspects of aging (including one with GBO’s editor in March) to 34 AM and FM stations in such markets as Richmond, Va., Bemidji, Minn. (location for the Coen Brothers’ Fargo); Atlanta, Ga., and Eugene, Ore.
Hosting the program, part of BizTalk Radio, is “Generation Bold” co-creator Adriane Berg, author of 14 books, such as How Not to Go Broke at 102, (2008). She is an attorney and financial advisor, who once served as a retirement speaker for USA Today. Most recently she co-authored F.E.A.R. FACTOR. (It stands for False Evidence Affecting Retirement.)
Berg e-mailed GBONews that she got into generational issues in 1988. An elder law lawyer, who helped found the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, she observed, “My audience always skewed older. I was a financial journalist doing national radio and one of the first women financial broadcasters on TV hosting IRS Tax Beat on Financial News Network, focusing on retirement living and planning.”
A leading-edge boomer, Berg said she got into retirement issues when she realized, “My mother was aging and I saw her problems as a women living only on Social Security.” Berg is now researching her next book “on income streams after 60. Pensions and Social Security are in jeopardy ,and people need to be self-sufficient financially. There is very little financial literacy for older adults; it’s all about ‘the stock market will always go up!’”
Besides immersing herself in issues in aging, she wrote, “I started a health care campaign for myself and recently walked 100 miles along the rough South Coast Path of England in five days. I want people to have a kick-ass old age. It takes determination.”
5. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Feed Me, Pharmacy: More Evidence That Industry Meals Are Linked to Costlier Prescribing” by Charles Ornstein, ProPublica (June 20): Their latest exposé shows mounting evidence “that doctors who receive as little as one meal from a drug company tend to prescribe more expensive, brand-name medications for common ailments than those who don’t.”
Ornstein also links to a new study published online in JAMA Internal Medicine showing “significant evidence that doctors who received meals tied to specific drugs prescribed a higher proportion of those products than their peers. And the more meals they received, the greater share of those drugs they tended to prescribe relative to other medications in the same category.”
*** “AGING IN THE FIELDS” is a two-part series about the struggles and often-early aging of migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley. Investigative journalist David Bacon has covered conditions for farm workers for over two decades. The latest of his four books is The Right to Stay Home (Beacon Press, 2013), about alternatives to forced migration and the criminalization of migrants. He also wrote the series with support from a NAM-GSA Journalists in Aging Fellowship, sponsored by the SCAN Foundation.
Bacon’s “AGING IN THE FIELDS” stories include: Part 1 — “No Alternative But to Keep Working,” Capital & Main/New America Media (May 30): Like thousands of undocumented farm workers, Anastasia Flores has aged faster than her 56 years. They pay Social Security, but can’t get its benefits in old age. Part 2 — “Retirement Followed by a Return to Work,” (June 1): The number of older farm workers is growing. Almost a third of them are over 45. In 2001 only 19 percent were over 45.
*** “THE GUARDIANSHIP TRAP” by Emily Gurnon is also a Journalists in Aging Fellowship series, this project for PBS Next Avenue and adapted for its format by New America Media. Gurnon, whose project was funded through the Retirement Research Foundation, examined the exploitation of elders, often by negligent courts, a problem certain to grow. The aging of the boomers, she shows, means more than ever will be placed in guardianships or conservatorships–with many at risk of abuse as they enter “the danger age.”
Here are the inks to the NAM version, which also connect back to the Next Avenue originals: Part 1 — “Protecting Elders, or Exploiting Them?” [http://tinyurl.com/jcqkq9j] (June 7). Part 2 — “Fighting the Greed Factor in Elder Abuse” (June 9). Part 3 — “System Improving, But Problems Persist,” (June 10).
*** “Reporters Learn Future of Work and Aging During Columbia Seminar,” by Richard Eisenberg, PBS Next Avenue (June 21). Eisenberg, managing editor of Next Avenue, published this overview of the recent 16th Age Boom Academy fellowship seminar at Columbia University, where he served as a session moderator. The two-and-a-half-day program included 19 reporters with GBO’s editor among them. It is held by Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Robert N. Butler Center on Aging.
The program centered on the role of working later into the traditional retirement years. Eisenberg wrote, “ First, a giant caveat: Not everyone can keep working into retirement due to health challenges (physical and cognitive). Physical health issues are especially problematic for older low-income Americans. Richard W. Johnson, a labor economist and senior fellow at the Urban Institute, forecasted, ‘We will see increasing inequality of people in older ages.’”
Eisenberg added, we “need to build up a stronger safety net for lower-income people and people with health problems.” A recent survey found that many Americans expecting to work until they’re 70 are the least likely to be able to due to their poor health.” Also, consider the paucity of jobs for those in their 60s, 70s and even 80s, he wrote. Over the next decade, 75 percent of the U.S. population growth will be people ages 62-69, said Johnson, but “under that age, the population will not be growing at all.”
Aging Center Associate Director Ruth Finkelstein, stated, “We have to create a broader agenda by creating jobs we want to have, lives we want to live and housing where we want to live in communities we want to create. There isn’t a they there, only a we. This is not a one-generation issue, but a quintessentially intergenerational issue.”
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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 2016, JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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