GBO NEWS: WHY AGEISM DOESN’T GET ‘OLD’: NYT’s Leonhardt Falsely Pits Young vs. Old; Princeton Scholars (and Study’s Coverage) Suggest Elders’ Fading Memories Most Prone to Fake News; & Deadlines for Journalism Fellowships
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Celebrating 26 Years.
January 13, 2019 — Volume 26, Number 2
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), 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. To subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge, simply sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, you’ll receive the table of contents in an e-mail, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: Love the Inner Elder You’re With.
1. WHY AGEISM DOESN’T GET ‘OLD’ – Part 1: NYT’s Leonhardt and the “Last Acceptable Form of Discrimination”
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE: *** March 15 Deadline is for National Press Foundation $10,000 Mental Health Reporting Award; March 1 Deadline for Health Journalism 2019 Fellowship Applications to Attend AHCJ’s May Conference in Baltimore.
3. WHY AGEISM DOESN’T GET ‘OLD’– Part 2: Bad Coverage of Princeton Study Suggesting Old People’s Bad Memories Big Factor in Fake News
1.WHY AGEISM DOESN’T GET ‘OLD’ – Part 1
I used to shake my head with a wry smile at my fellow gray heads who would gather at a neighborhood café’s table and sometimes rib each other and themselves as “geezers,” “curmudgeons” or “I’m just an old fart.” The question for those concerned with stereotyping, though, is where’s the harm?
Ostensibly, one may consider the extent to which terminology my reinforce demeaning attitudes toward a group that could lead others to go along with unfair measures directed at them. For journalists, that is, when it comes to actual harm, reporters always need to “follow the money”–and the power.
Age bias is hardly unique to media and political dialogue in the United States. For instance, the UK news tabloid, iNews(circ. 300,000), bristled recently at mainstream English responses to 97-year-old Prince Phillip’s automobile accident. The commentary by journalist Stefano Hatfield was headlined, “Casual Ageism Is the Last Acceptable Form of Discrimination.” The Prince, despite being a notoriously accident-prone driver for decades, and this time, wrote Hatfield, the mishap elicited “a chorus of instant condemnation of the law allowing older people being able to drive at all.”
Hatfield also noted pop star Jamelia’s recently advocating that seniors be barred from voting because “they will not be around to experience the consequences of their actions.” Furthermore, he tagged Guardian columnist Polly Toynbeefor positing that a second Brexit vote would more likely win for the “remainers,” because “enough old levers will have died.” As in the U.S. election of Donald J. Trump, the Brit narrative is contaminated by the apple worm of ageism, due, as Hatfield put it, to “lazy thinking.”
In the United States anti-ageism voices have been gaining volume, yet American culture’s undercurrent of age prejudice persists not only among even prominent journalists, but, most significantly, among sources. More about that later.
‘Aging, a Natural Life Condition’
A January 14 post on StriaNews.com headlined “Fighting Ageism Requires Long-Term Action” carries the drop-line, “Anti-ageism efforts are gaining momentum; now what can be done to sustain them?”
Writer and social gerontologist Jeanette Leardi, begins, “Something radical is happening in the civil rights movement against age discrimination. After years of enduring widespread social prejudice, older adults and their generational allies are becoming more aware of grassroots and establishment initiatives to promote aging as a natural and therefore acceptable condition of life, and these efforts are gaining momentum.”
GBO’s editor places the sheer irony of anyone having to make such an observation alongside, “Race is (genetically) only skin deep” and “Equal pay for equal work.” Sad, but true: each is like a dressing that needs to be changed regularly over an ever-festering wound.
Leardi asks, “Can this anti-ageism momentum last, or will it slowly fade? The answer lies in whether or not individuals, organizations, businesses, and the public as a whole commit to taking long-term action to sustain it.” Her piece, addressed to the StriaNewsaudience of business and gerontology leaders, quotes a range of commenters, such as This Chair Rocks author Ashton Applewhite, Alice Fisher of The Radical Age Movement and GBO’s editor, on personal and business strategies for combatting ageism.
Still, age-blame continues to pull down this old American life as an ugly and silent undertow. Especially when it comes to budget-driven assumptions about what’s politically possible, that “lazy thinking” persists, even among otherwise bright and presumably liberal economic and policy analysts.
The Super Rich—and Old People
A case in point is “The Fleecing of Millennials,” in which New York Timescolumnist David Leonhardt (Jan. 27, 2019) champions the economic cause of today’s young-adults versus the trickle down greed of the very rich and the King Midas-like hoarding of stock wealth by corporate America—but he also sideswipes older Americans. Accurately, Leonhardt stresses that even with the country’s much-touted economic gains, “For Americans under the age of 40, the 21st century has resembled one long recession.”
Yet, apparently oblivious to the widespread financial strain on seniors, Leonhardt pits old against young by reprising the old generational warfare argument.
In this case he cites Democratic “rising star,” Pete Buttigieg. “intergenerational justice” .The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., and presidential candidate has spoken of addressing several important issues for younger generations, but through the dubious age-based conflict of “intergenerational justice.”
As for older people, cost-of-living analysis based on the Elder Index shows, for instance, that about half of older adults living along are struggling—particularly in high-rent cities—as are about one-quarter of retiree households with two people.
Make no mistake, age, race, sex and other demographic filters are always useful for corelating the effects of different trends, of sharpening one’s understanding of how larger factors play out in real life. They don’t, though, establish causation. Misinterpreted, though, they can lead to erroneous and potentially destructive conclusions.
Leonhardt gives lip service to the challenges facing older Americans: “Yes, older workers face their own challenges, like age discrimination. Over all, though, the generational gap in both income and wealth is growing.”
The columnist later emphasizes, “But the country’s biggest economic problems aren’t about hordes of greedy old people profiting off the young. They’re about an economy that showers much of its bounty on the already affluent, at the expense of most Americans — and of our future. The young pay the biggest price for these inequities.”
“Kids Share” Pits Children vs. Their Grandparents
But wait, next comes his political money-shot:
“There are some unavoidable trade-offs between the young and the old: A dollar spent on Medicare is unavailable for universal pre-K. Given these trends, you’d think the government would be trying to help the young. But it’s not. If anything, federal and state policy is going in the other direction. Medicare and Social Security have been spared from cuts. Programs that benefit younger workers and families have not.”
Leonhardt links to the Urban Institute’s recent “Kid’s Share 2018“ summary brief with bullet points including this one: “Under current law, the children’s share of the budget is projected to drop from 9.4 percent to 6.9 percent over the next decade, as spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest payments on the debt consume a growing share of the budget.”
Nonsense. While the Urban Institute (UI) is too-often referred to as a liberal think tank, to its credit its staff actually, unlike the Heritage Foundation, say, includes those with a range of viewpoints. How is a reporter supposed to know the difference? How about common sense. Even distinguished economic scholars need to be questioned about a flaw as obvious as playing off one demographic group’s interests against another. While the report’s exposure of declining support for children’s needs is critically important, the UI’s analysis is entirely focuses on federal spending.
Actually, this UI brief doesn’t indicate whether it included on the youth side the portion of Social Security going to surviving spouses and children, which other experts say is the largest federal program for the young.
More significantly, though, most spending on children in the U.S. is done at the state level—for education. Until about 20 years ago, studies of national spending showed that total federal and state allocations for the young and old were roughly equal. What changed—how about poorly controlled health care costs, exacerbated by the Medicare’s being blocked from negotiating the costs of prescription drugs. How about declining education funding at the federal level and in states where taxpayer-revolt laws like California’s Proposition 13, slashed property tax support for schools.
Here’s the bottom line: Playing off the life interests—health vs. education and future economic prospects in this case–of one generation against another stinks of the most pernicious odor of ageism.
If you believe in zero-sum thinking–that the same dynamically-expanding economy Leonhardt describes cannot afford proper health care and education for its populace, even after GOP budget hawks went along with their $2 trillion tax cut—go back to the web. Try reading a few piece on U.S. wealth and debt by Nobel Laureates Joseph Stiglitz, who first defined the 1% vs. 99%, and Leonhardt’s op-ed page colleague, Paul Krugman, or a slew of other respected economists I’d be happy to point out.
*** MORE READING: Although she hasn’t won a Nobel, yet, the above-mentioned author and blogger Ashton Applewhitedid offer a worthwhile read on this topic in The Guardian, “How Did Old People Become Political Enemies of the Young?” (Dec. 23, 2018). Applewhite has also just launched the tour for the new editing of her book,
This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, from Celadon Books/Macmillan. Journalists can request tour dates and a review copy from Christine.Mykityshyn@celadonbooks.com.
[See Part 2 below on ageism in “Fake News” study.]
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** The Application Deadline is March 15 for the National Press Foundation (NPF) Carolyn C. Mattingly Award for Mental Health Reporting. The award, which carries a $10,000 prize, is open to any U.S.-based journalist at a U.S.-based news organization, including print, broadcast and online journalists. Check the application website for details. They require a non-refundable $50 fee for each application. Direct questions to Jenny Ash-Maher at jenny@nationalpress.org or 202-663-7285.
*** Health Journalism 2019 — Fellowships Available: The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) annual conference is set for Baltimore, May 2-5, and reporters can now apply for travel fellowships in nine categories. The deadline to apply is March 1.
A fellowship covers the conference registration fee; a one year’s membership in AHCJ (new or extended); up to four nights in conference hotel for reporters living beyond a 50-mile radius from host hotel; and up to $400 for travel assistance (outside of 50-mile radius from host hotel) and up to $100 (within the 50-miles).
AHCJ offers fellowships in three general categories, including for ethnic media journalists, rural reporters, and those on non-health beats. Others are specifically for those in Colorado, New York, California, Missouri and Kansas. There’s also a category for college J-school students and faculty members.
Among the wide range of sessions, some will be of particular interest to generations-beat reporters, such as “Do drug pricing reform efforts promise consumer relief?” and “Successful aging in place: What’s working?”
3. WHY AGEISM DOESN’T GET ‘OLD’– Part 2
Fake News and Old People’s Bad Memories
Who, as the late Mr. Hardywould say to Mr. Laurel, got us into this “fine mess”? Oddly unquestioning news reports during the second week of January were published under such headlines as, “Elderly, Conservatives Shared Facebook Fakery,” by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, and “Boomers Share the Most Fake News on Facebook, Study Finds,” by Sarah Emerson, on Vice.com’s“Motherboard” blog.
The subject of these headlines is an article published in Science Advances(Jan. 9, 2019), titled “Less Than You Think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook,” by Princeton’s Andrew Guess and two colleagues. Not one of the many news stories on this Princeton study among those this editor reviewed questioned the researchers’ strikingly unsubstantiated (and ageist) statements, in particular their speculative remarks suggesting that older voters as a group may suffer from diminished mental acuity.
In one story, New York Magazine “Intelligencer” writer, Madison Malone Kircher led her piece by celebrating that the Princeton study confirmed her lingering notion about older people: “Today in ‘news that is nice to have to confirm things you probably were already assuming without statistical data’: A new study found that people over 65 are the most likely to sharing (sic) fake news.” The headline, echoing those over most other news reports: ”Fake News Is an Old-People Problem.”
The real problem: Neither Kircher nor the other reporters seem to have questioned statements in the study that should have waved red flags to any journalist. That includes the article she used as to source her blog from on the tech site, The Verge. “Despite that a juicy bit of social research on the hot topic of fake news issued from political scientists at two major universities (Princeton and NYU), the rules of reporting must still dig in and question. Right?
Two Ageist ‘Explanations’
Toward the end of the Science Advances study, Guess and his coauthors wrote, “Two potential explanations warrant further investigation. First, following research in sociology and media studies, it is possible that an entire cohort of Americans, now in their 60s and beyond, lacks the level of digital media literacy necessary to reliably determine the trustworthiness of news encountered online.”
Really? GBO’s editor is 73, a child of the ’60s. Yeah, we know the revolution was televised, and now we can’t find a VCR machine to plat the tapes. But although surveys do show declines with successively older age cohorts in computer use, I don’t see much in this paper to justify suggesting that old age might somehow cast doubt on one’s ability to discern which media to trust or not—at least no more reliably than people of any age in any selection of media, online or off.
Oh, yes, and Prof. Guess and his coauthors also got a tidy op-ed about their provocative study published in the Washington Post.
Guess and his colleagues then offer, “A second possibility, drawn from cognitive and social psychology, suggests a general effect of aging on memory. Under this account, memory deteriorates with age in a way that particularly undermines resistance to ‘illusions of truth’ and other effects related to belief persistence and the availability heuristic, especially in relation to source cues (20–22). The severity of these effects would theoretically increase with the complexity of the information environment and the prevalence of misinformation.”
Think about it for a moment: Researchers publish newsy results they can easily explain, except that they the dismiss their finding of disparities between two of their research samples (Republicans and Democrats). Then they suggest that age itself is the culprit. To justify that supposition, they cite broad research on seniors’ flagging memory capacity, but they offer no scientifically valid link to the proclivity for some elders (and possible influence on their votes) to dote on fake news.
That is—old people just aren’t bright enough as a group to vote responsibly. That’s from a trio of presumably distinguished scholars, whom reporters should have asked about their skewed knowledge of gerontological mental health. The studies they link to don’t, in fact, suggest anything about age and voting (or any other specified activity) at all. They merely hide behind stock academic qualifiers that future research might look more into a possible link between generally declining memory with age and susceptibility to fake news.
In fact, the researchers’ large sample (1,300) shows a wide gap not only between voters 65-plus and those of other ages with 8.5% overall having shared fake news on social media, and 18% of GOP seniors vs. 3.5% of Democratic elders. But their paper discounts the gap out of hand before shifting to notions of flagging memory among all older people. The AP headline would have been accurate without the comma after “elderly,” that is, ““Elderly Conservatives Shared Facebook Fakery.”
GBO’s editor certainly has known progressives of any age who have been smitten by conspiracy theories, but how is it that three political “scientists” jumped from 3.5% of Democrats to an article eliciting such headlines the Washington Postone over the professors’ own op-ed: “Who Was Most Likely to Share Fake News in 2016? Seniors.”
Over 60 and as Dotty as ‘Maude Frickert’
What stands out in highlighter-yellow is that neither the research trio nor the news stories called this blatant ageism into question. What’s more, the presumed “Maude Frickert” residue of elder confusion (thank you, Jonathan Winters) that the study posits seems to have elicited no questions for the researchers about potentially stereotypical effect of their analysis. A generations-beat reporter might have asked, for instance:
Did you examine the broader range of aging research to see how memory research would apply to voting information—or not? Could you elaborate on your reasoning for dismissing the gap between the GOP and Democratic senior groups? And have you looked at fake-news behavior of other subgroups in different situations to compare whether any of them have had a statistical spike when caught up in emotional issues—say young mothers concerned about vaccines or middle-aged men worried about guns? That is, may those groups also yield higher sharing of conspiracy theories posted online and perhapsanswer whether age itself is a major factor in the sharing of fakery around heated issues?
Writing on the technology site, Verge (“People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds,” Jan. 9, 2019) Casey Newton provided a similar summary to that of other news stories. Bolstering the Princeton paper’s dotty-old-people hypothesis, she mentioned gratuitously that the FBI has a whole program on elder consumer fraud. (Yes, and so do the FTC and other agencies, which also look at many other factors, including concerted elder targeting by scammers of immigrants, those with lower education levels, ideology and other variables.)
Newton concluded her piece by quoting fake-news researcher Matthew Gentzkow, of Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, who is cited in the study. He told her, “The age result in this paper points very directly toward at least narrowing down the set of solutions that are likely to be most effective.” He added, “If the problem is concentrated in a relatively small set of people, then thinking about the interventions that would be most effective for those people is going to take us a lot farther.”
Note that Gentzkow inadvertently pinpoints the study’s inherent contradiction in identifying “a relatively small set of people.” Yet one news story after another was headed in some variation of “Elderly People Most Likely To Share Fake News, Study Finds” (CBS3 Philadelphia website).
Although Prof. Guess and his coauthors show that their sample revealed a small blip on the electoral seismic chart—that 18% of GOP voters compared with low 3.5% for older Dems—the sweeping taint daubed on older people reflects, in my unscientific opinion, nothing other than an underlying default to ageism in newsrooms.
It shouldn’t have taken a PhD in journalism to question the researchers lazy default to the improbable mental decline of all older voters and question the Guess and company on it. And it shouldn’t have taken three PhD professors, well, to know better.
–Paul Kleyman
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2019 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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