12th Journalists in Aging Fellowship Deadline, Aug 11; PBS NewsHour’s Ageism; Biden Fires Trump Social Security Head; PLUS NPR Jaffe’s Breast Cancer Secret; Boomer Financial Distress; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Our 28th Year.
July 14, 2021 — Volume 28, Number 7
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. If you have difficulty getting to the full issue of GBONews with the links provided below, simply go to www.gbonews.org to read the latest or past editions. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. [pfkleyman@gmail.com] 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: 50+ Billionaire Dudes in Space–Virgin, Blue Origin, Tesla–Engines by Harley?
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: *** Deadline for Journalists in Aging Fellowships; *** Apply for USC Health Journalism Data Fellowships.
2. THE BOOKMOBILE: *** By the Light of Burning Dreams on Who Won the 2nd American Revolution Sixties Style; *** Lincolnomics, John F. Wasik’s 19th Book Release Celebrates His Beatle-ish 64th.
3. GEN BEATLES NEWS: NPR’s Jaffe, Oscar-Winner Chasnoff Face Breast Cancer.
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Fired and Defiant, Former Social Security Chief Is Cut Off from Agency Computers,” by Lisa Rein, Washington Post (July 12, 2021);
*** “Biden Needs to Clean House at the Social Security Administration, and Fast,” by Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times (June 29, 2021);
*** “Baby Boomers Face Financial Distress and Age Discrimination,” by Howard Gold, MarketWatch.
5. BOOMER BASHING NOT OK: *** PBS News Hour’s Generational Blame Game and Check-Box Journalism.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** Application Deadline Aug. 11 for 12th Annual Journalists in Aging Fellows Program.: We did it again! The Journalists Network on Generations (GBONews’ Publisher and the Gerontological Society of America, or GSA) are now accepting applications for our remarkable 12th year. The 2021-22 class — from both mainstream news reporters and ethnic or community media – will bring the total number of participants to about 200 reporters in all media formats. Fellows have, to date, generated more than 715 stories across the spectrum of topics on aging, in English with many translated from their original Spanish, Chinese, Korean and other languages.
Those articles have brought essential perspectives to often under-served audiences from across the spectrum of American cultures on vital topics – some considered taboo for discussion in their communities, such as on dementia care or elder abuse, along with positive reports, such as on preserving cultural heritage. A full list of past fellowship stories with links is posted online.
The roughly 150 media organizations that have participated in the program have ranged from such mainstream outlets as Politico, the Washington Post and many national or regional NPR stations, as well as such ethnic/community news entities as The Root, Univision, Sing Tao Daily and La Opinión.
Selected Fellows receive a stipend of $1,500, plus all expenses paid for attending the GSA Annual Scientific Meeting, which reconvenes in-person this fall, in Phoenix, Ariz. As in previous years, half of the fellows will be chosen from general-audience media and half from ethnic or other minority media outlets that serve communities within the U.S. Staff and freelance reporters and who are covering or wish to cover issues in aging are eligible.
Although media coverage of aging has improved a great deal in recent years the flow of stories on our rapidly aging nation continues to fall short of the public’s right to know and understand how rapidly increasing longevity – with two full generations of average life expectancy added in only the last century – affects individuals, families and their communities. The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted underlying inequities for elders, especially older women and seniors in ethnic/racial groups, for whom having gray-hair in the American rainbow proved particularly damaging and deadly.
Continued pandemic coverage of aging is only one essential area of coverage. The fellowship program aims to support applicants proposed in-depth stories or series on any angle about aging in America. That includes the challenges, but also the often-unacknowledged contributions of today’s healthier, more active older people in areas from health care to the arts.
GSA’s Phoenix conference, the largest academic conclave in aging, will attract 4,000 experts in aging to attend hundreds of research-based sessions offering stories and sources on dozens of subject areas. The conference theme will be “Disruption to Transformation: Aging in the ‘New Normal.’”
The Fellowship application website includes complete information. Prospective applicants can also request further details about how to submit an application from Program Co-Director and GSA Director of Communications Todd Kluss at tkluss@geron.org or (202) 587-2839. For further details about fellowship requirements and potential stories, contact Program Co-Director and Journalists Network on Generations Program Coordinator Liz Seegert at liz@lizseegert.com or (516) 225-9636.
*** The Deadline for USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s Data Fellowship is Sept. 1. The program includes both national and California-only entries. All are asked to submit proposals examining “the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and/or associated economic problems on children, youth, and families, as well as how effectively government and private agencies served them,” says their website. California journalists, though, must focus theirproposals for health and health projects, “with priority consideration given to applicants focusing on disadvantaged populations.” Find details here.
The basic grant is $2,000, but grants of up to $10,000 are available for Fellows who can document the need. Reporters should “propose an ambitious data-based reporting project to be completed within six months after the training,” which will be held October 25-29, 2021. Annenberg will decide in the coming weeks whether to hold the Fellowship via Zoom or on the University of Southern California campus.
Leading the training sessions will be respected data journalists — Christian McDonald of the University of Texas, Austin; Andrew Ba Tran, investigative data reporter at the Washington Post; MaryJo Webster, data editor, Minneapolis Star-Tribune; and Aaron Williams, former investigative data reporter at the Washington Post, and other journalists. Annenberg’s release promises, “You’ll learn how to acquire, clean, analyze, and visualize data that can add authority to your stories.”
They stress, however, that although the deadline for applications is September 1: “We require applicants to have a conversation before August 24 with one of our Senior Fellows. EmailSonny Albaradoat Healthj@usc.edu to discuss your project proposal and arrange a phone conversation with one of our data journalism trainers.”
2. THE BOOKMOBILE
*** “The Martyr Complex” is Arthur Allen’s Chapter in the new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution (Harper) by Salon founder David Talbot and his sister, New Yorker staff writer, Margaret Talbot with an assist by her hubby, author Art Allen. What started as David’s solo quest to tell the tales of pivotal movements that made The Sixties got sidelined by his 2017 stoke.
His slow recovery from that Thanksgiving shock at age 66, led to Talbot’s eloquent book, Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke (Chronicle Prism, 2020), which GBONews reviewed.
David had begun interviews and writing chapters when the stroke struck. That’s when By the Light . . . became a family affair, with Margaret stepping in and Art offering to write his chapter about the triumph and decline of Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta’s United Farmworkers Union.
Allen, who is the editor of Kaiser Health News’ California Healthline website and a former Journalists in Aging Fellow, explained to GBONews by email, “After the stroke, David was on the hook for the book and, for a while, didn’t know whether he’d recover enough to finish it. So he asked Margaret to step in, and I volunteered to help. For a while it looked like we would be writing substantially more than half of the book, but as David recovered he was able to finish chapters that initially we thought we’d be doing.”
For his part, Allen stressed, “Cesar Chavez was part of the project from the beginning and seemed like a natural for me. I lived in Mexico for a year and in El Salvador for three. I have always been interested in learning more about the UFW.” Born in 1959, he added, “The UFW’s grape and lettuce boycotts were part of my childhood political consciousness.”
In researching his book, Ripe: [https://tinyurl.com/c5mdsm7s] The Search for the Perfect Tomato (Counterpoint Press, 2010), he said, “I spent a couple days picking tomatoes in South Florida with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The CIW learned a lot from the UFW, in particular the relative futility of strikes without an appeal that involved the ultimate consumers of the farm products.” (The Harvard Business Review called the Fair Food Program, which grew from CIW’s tomato strike, “among the 15 “most important social-impact success stories of the past century.”)
Also, of particular relevance now, back in 2007 Allen published Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver (W.W. Norton).
Of the new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams, the San Francisco Chronicle called it “A mesmerizing dive into ‘60s and ‘70s rebellion.”
And the Kirkus Review said, “Through sharp reporting and good storytelling, the authors enliven a journalistic genre that in less skilled hands might have gone flat: the ‘Where are they now?’ story. They devote a chapter to each of seven flashpoints of the 1960s and ’70s that created ‘the second American Revolution.’ These include Black Power, gay pride, the anti-war movement, the siege of Wounded Knee, the battle for abortion rights, the rise of the United Farm Workers, and the ‘celebrity activism’ embodied by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.”
Journalists can request a review copy and media information from Rachel Elinsky at Rachel.Elinsky@HARPERCOLLINS.com .
*** Lincolnomics: How President Lincoln Constructed the Great American Economy (Diversion Books) released in April, is John F. Wasik’s 19th book. The volume makes the case that the 16th U.S. president “was our foremost architect of economic development, equal treatment and physical and intellectual improvements, from transportation to medical research.” The versatile, Chicago-based economics scribe, also writes extensively on retirement finance—as he edges more closely to his own.
In fact, on July 2, Wasik celebrated his 64th by posting his Forbes.com column, headlined, “Happy Birthday To Me! How I Think About Un-Retirement Planning.” He explained, “I’ll lay it out straight: I have no intention of retiring from meaningful work. As I celebrate another birthday, this is what I’m thinking about.” His thinking out loud unfolded as a column full of handy tips on “things to consider” for readers who are late in their careers, but are set on remaining productive—and with purpose.
3. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** “Why I Kept My Cancer A Secret, And Why I Won’t Anymore,” by Ina Jaffe, NPR News (June 22, 2021): One of the premier journalists on the generations beat, Jaffe’s courageous announcement underscores the most sobering aspect of our newsbeat. She announced, “I’ve been keeping a secret. I’ve decided to tell it. I have metastatic breast cancer, stage 4. That means the breast cancer has spread to my lungs, bones and brain. There is no cure. Eventually, it kills you.”
She continued, “Actually, I’ve had it for two years. Keeping it secret served me well. I didn’t have to explain myself to friends and strangers while I was still in the hysterical stage. Because, faced with an incurable cancer diagnosis, I did what any normal person would do: I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. I sobbed a lot. I was grieving for my own life.”
In the piece, Jaffe discusses her two reasons for revealing her secret: “The first is that I realized that much of my initial despair was based on bad information. I was wrong about almost everything. So maybe my confession will shorten the Despair Phase for others.”
She continues, “The second reason is much more in my wheelhouse as a journalist: outrage.” Jaffe dispelled mistaken impressions she had about metastatic breast cancer, as she researched her condition, and notes some things she did have “mostly right,” such as that “the five-year relative survival rate is about 1 in 4. And it’s worse for Black women. Due to the types of cancers that they get, African American women have the highest breast cancer mortality rate of any U.S. racial or ethnic group, at 26.8 per 100,000 annually.”
Jaffe goes on, “All of these things were painful to realize because I’d been planning on becoming a really cool old lady. While covering aging for NPR, I’d met so many inspirational elders that I wanted to be one of them. This diagnosis doesn’t mean I won’t be. There are outliers, as they’re called. People who live 10 years or more with stage 4.”
As for her outrage: “As I began to research metastatic breast cancer, I came across the stunning statistic that only 7% of funding for breast cancer research is devoted to metastatic disease.” Currently, the condition kills about 44,000 people annually in the United States.
“Meanwhile,” she wrote, “I feel fine. The only discomfort I have is the result of my treatments. I have no pain from the cancer itself. I know that’s coming. I’m just not sure when.” And meanwhile, GBONews sends our warmest thoughts and wishes to Jaffe, who sets such a high bar for deepening the public’s understanding of our lives and the meaning of its limits.
*** PROGNOSIS – Notes on Living by Oscar-winning director Debra Chasnoff and Kate Stilley Steiner (82 minutes, Citizen Film & Groundspark Productions) continues this issue’s story of stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in the ranks of media. The documentary will be screened July 25 at the 41st Annual Jewish Film Festival [https://tinyurl.com/rhpe26y7] in San Francisco.
Chasnoff, reluctantly at first, decided to turn her documentary lens on herself following her 2015 diagnosis. It would become a two-and-a-half year struggle until her death soon after her 60th birthday. Committed to using film as a tool for personal and social change, she exposed her most vulnerable life moments with the support of her wife, social justice attorney Nancy Otto, her two adult sons, and her LGBTQ chosen family. Stilley Steiner completed the film with Otto and editor Mike Shen.
“Chas,”as she was known, won the Academy Award in 1992 for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for her film Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment.
GBONews readers can view the trailer for Prognosis here, and can request a review screener of the full feature from Maguire Mount.
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Fired and Defiant, Former Social Security Chief Is Cut Off from Agency Computers,” by Lisa Rein, Washington Post (July 12, 2021): “Ousted Social Security commissioner Andrew Saul, the Trump appointee who declared Friday he would defy his firing by President Biden, on Monday found his access to agency computers cut off, even as his acting replacement moved to undo his policies. . . . Saul, 74, called his firing and that of his deputy David Black, in an email from the White House Personnel Office, a ‘palace coup’ that he said blindsided him, given that his six-year term was not set to expire until 2025. As Republicans made plans to defend him, Saul said he had no public announcement — yet — on his strategy to remain in office as the ‘duly confirmed Social Security commissioner.’”
The story goes on, “’There will be more,’ said Saul, a wealthy former women’s apparel executive and prominent Republican donor who had served on the board of a conservative think tank that has called for cuts to Social Security benefits. ‘Stay tuned.”
Rein reports, “Experts in federal personnel law, meanwhile, said it was doubtful that Saul could successfully sue the administration to get his job back, following two rulings by the Supreme Court that affirmed the authority of the president to fire the head of an independent agency with a single leader.”
President Biden appointed Kilolo Kijakazi, PhD, as acting commissioner. She joined the administration last January, after serving on the staff of the Urban Institute, where she conducted research on economic security, structural racism, and the racial wealth gap. Previously, was a program officer at the Ford Foundation. Prior to that, she was a program analyst for the US Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service.
Kijakazi’s publications include African-American Economic Development and Small Business Ownership(Routledge, 1997, 2014).
***Biden Needs to Clean House at the Social Security Administration, and Fast,” by Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times (June 29, 2021): And fast President Biden has moved since Hiltzik, LAT’s Pulitzer Prize-winning economics columnist posted this piece by firing Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul. Still, Hiltzik’s column provides excellent background to untangle the issues.
The position of Social Security Commissioner is officially a six-year appointment by the president with Senate confirmation. It was set at six years with the intention of depoliticizing the appointments: The commissioner usually has been a career bureaucrat, as Hiltzik explains, with deep knowledge of the program’s workings. Having the term at six years supposedly meant the individual would remain through at least two administrations, minimizing possible shuffling of the job to political sycophants at will. More recently, though, the U.S. Supreme Court handed firing authority to Presidents Trump and Biden in a pair of rulings.
One big change, Hiltzik stresses: the GOP-controlled Senate refused even to schedule a hearing for President Obama’s choice to run Social Security, longtime agency staffer Carolyn W. Colvin, whom the Senate had approved in 2010 as Acting Deputy Commissioner.
As other sources report, when Obama later tapped Colvin as Acting Commissioner of Social Security, the Senate balked at making the appointment permanent with some GOP members blaming her for problems with the computer system. She served in that acting capacity until Jan. 20, 2017. So, McConnell effectively repoliticized the process.
Then, before Donald Trump moved out, he appointed a number of officials to run Social Security and other “nonpolitical” agencies, who got quick Senate approval, so they would be installed for full terms into Biden’s administration, in Saul’s case, until 2025.
More recently, before Donald Trump moved out, he appointed a number of officials to run Social Security and other “nonpolitical” agencies, who got quick Senate approval, so they would be installed for full terms into Biden’s administration, in Saul’s case, until 2025.
So, how qualified was Saul? Hiltzik writes, “Saul’s experience was as an executive at a couple of women’s garment firms and as a fundraiser for George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign.” (Evidently, he did a heck of a job.)
“Saul has claimed in his public statements to be devoted to making the Social Security Administration more efficient, but in action he has done the opposite. In October 2019, he abolished the agency’s 6-year-old telework program, which allowed members of its 44,000-strong operational staff to work remotely; about 25% of the workers took advantage of the program. He gave the employees just two weeks to prepare to return to working at its headquarters outside Baltimore. Thanks to telework, union officials say, productivity went up. ‘Instead of losing 30% of the incoming calls because people are tired of waiting, we are getting to 95% of the calls,’ Ralph DeJuliis, head of the union representing the workers, said during the Social Security Works webcast.”
Hiltzik’s story is an informative read for any reporter looking at this head-scratching development and maybe getting reader Tweets and calls asking what it’s all about.
*** “Baby Boomers Face Financial Distress and Age Discrimination,” by Howard Gold, MarketWatch (July 3, 2021): “Now, after decades of economic upheaval, including three bear markets and two deep recessions in just the past 20 years, many Baby Boomers . . . are struggling. The eldest boomers have mostly retired. But millions of boomers in their 60s still want or need to work, and are having a hard time finding jobs. COVID19 made the problem a lot worse. Nearly 900,000 Americans between the ages of 60 and 69 lost their jobs between December 2019 and December 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 5% decline in the number of employed people in that age group. Some 21.2 million Americans in their 60s are no longer in the labor force, the BLS reported.”
MarketWatch contacted readers “after they responded on LinkedIn to an October column, “Half of Americans over 55 may retire poor.” They were in varied financial shape—one had just emerged from personal bankruptcy, another had a well-funded retirement plan–dealing with aging parents, illness, even the sudden death of a spouse. All had been laid off with no explanation, some before COVID 19 hit. Since then, they had sent out dozens of resumes yet got few job interviews and even fewer offers. All firmly believed they faced systemic age discrimination.”
5. BOOMER BASHING NOT OK
*** PBS News Hour’s Generational Blame Game and Check-Box Journalism: What to think of the News Hour’s two-part series on intergenerational warfare between “OK, Boomer” blame and their presumed victims, the Millennials?
This editor will usually tune into reports by veteran economics correspondent Paul Soloman about the intersection of money and society. Yet, his latest, a two-parter run July 7-8, is more like a crash site of media clunkers at the cross roads of Boomers and their Millennial grandkids. (Funny how midlife Gen Xers are routinely invisible in media stories sold around generational conflict.)
Soloman’s first segment, titled “‘OK, Boomer’: What’s Behind Millennials’ Growing Resentment for Their Predecessors?” (July 7, 2021, 9:37 mins.) builds on the provocations of author-investor Bruce Gibney, 45, who wrote A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America(Hachette Books, 2017).
Part 2, headlined, “Baby Boomers on Their Role in Social Change and How Luck Affected Their Prosperity,” (July 8, 2021), features Leonard Steinhorn, 65, author of The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s, 2007).
The series opens with a clip from Saturday Night Live’s “rap” video (March 27, 2021), which falsely attacked Boomers for hoarding Covid-19 inoculations. (It goes, “Baby Boomers, Greatest Generation, got all the money, and got the vaccinations,” to which GBONews noted SNL’s neglect of the pandemic’s disproportionate infliction of suffering and death among older people.) The program later includes a snippet from the 2019 TikTok viral video that put the buzz on the phrase, “OK, Boomer,” a cynical frown at elders who are so-o-o blind to their own flaws.
The NewsHour segments ostensibly checks all of the right boxes for reportorial balance: the pro vs. con authors appear on successive episodes; demographically diverse citizen panels represent the Boomer and Millennial sides on the presumptive grievances; the experts argue contrasting economic and social interpretations of the issue at hand. Yet, as with other examples of check-box journalism, these reports missed the substantive forest for the arguable trees.
For all of the series’ semblance of depth, the very framing of the nation’s ills in the broadest population terms, by age group, effectively perpetuates the bias inherent in purported demographic conflict. The adversarial posturing is ageist by definition.
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
The initial piece presents one-sided economic data with Gibney asserting his anti-Boomer interpretation, but Soloman offers no indication that his interviewee’s stats, charts, graphs and viewpoint are controversial, such as that the Boomers are at fault for piling so much student debt on the nation’s youth.
Unmentioned is the debt burden across age groups, for instance. Many 50-something Gen Xers and Boomers who returned to college or retrained in midlife carry student debt into their later years. That Gibney backs off from blaming individual Boomers fails to address his questionable data that the NewsHour presents as factual.
The segment was hardly offset 24-hours later by Steinhorn’s more liberal socio-historical perspective, which more broadly countered that the Millennial’s hazardous economic straits have causes far more complex than a notion of Boomer exploitation of their grandchildren.
What’s wrong with this NewsHour picture? One clue is in Soloman’s introduction to Gibney, whom he identifies a “writer, jackpot winner as an early investor in PayPal and Facebook, the economic anxieties of millennials are the result of decades of sociopathic choices by boomers who grew up in a booming America.”
How many journalists reading this have also dabbled in venture capitalism? More power to writers with such financial prowess, but any reporting on one such as this might well focus more pointedly on his socio-economic slant than Soloman does here. Wouldn’t a more honest staging the video debate been more apt in terms of Wall street vs. Main Street, rather than as Boomers against Millennials?
Token Voices of the People
Both News Hour segments include well-meaning reactions to the presumed generational indictment by a random selection of four Millennials one day, and then four Boomers the next, representing different presumed demographic diversity.
The eight voices-of-the-people participants do provide valuable insights on their individual difficulties and resiliency, such as with debt and limited employment opportunities. But their comments are also valuable in reflecting the wide range of pubic confusion about the state of today’s fractured and declining quality of American life. Would that Soloman and staff had interrogated their difficulties in terms of political and economic accountability, rather than generational blame.
This editor was especially struck by Millennial Briana Nicholas, 28, identified as “an accountant in Philadelphia, has $200,000 in student debt for her degree in historic preservation.” At one point in the program, Nicholas, who is Black, seems to see through the generational framing of the discussion: “Boomer is kind of like a filler word for status quo. Like, it’s not the generation itself. It’s just the fact that, like, the unwillingness to understand that things have changed, things are changing, and kind of keep it the way it is because it worked for them, assuming that it’ll work for everyone else. And that’s just not true.”
Yes, it worked for “them,” but whom, exactly, and entire generation of Boomers at the expense of 10s of millions of Millennials? And those oily numbers do count. Soloman, born in 1944, seemed tickled to be counted among the Boomers, according to Gibney’s bracketing of the generation as being born from 1940-1965, not the generally accepted 19 years, from 1946 through 1964. But the correspondent failed to note that’s almost a decade longer than Millennials in the author’s count, only 16 years from 1981 through 1996. No wonder Boomer numbers seem to beat up on the kids.
Well, what’s in a name? In fact the numbers are so diaphanous (the U.S. Census Bureau bridges Millennials from the start of 1982 to 2000, for instance) that the NewsHour correspondent seems rather incurious about the effect on Gibney’s generational shifting.
Generational definitions are slippery at best. While a birth cohort’s living standards and social inclinations are informed by historical conditions, demographic blame for broad policy decisions deserves no media respect beyond questioning whose finger is doing the pointing.
The entire NewsHour series failed, as well, to examine the very social and racial diversity of the older generation. There’s no mention, For example, of the vast disparity in average household wealth between White Boomer’s and their Black or Latinx counterparts.
Gibney’s “Sociopathic” Boomers
Soloman summarizes key facets of Gibney’s psycho-social diagnosis of Boomers as “sociopaths.” What’s more, he contends, they really didn’t accomplish much, even in The Sixties, while taking credit for the strides of their predecessors’ “investments in roads, new schools, education.”
When it was “the Boomers’ turn to give,” Soloman’s precis goes on, “We [Boomers] continued to take: tax cuts, expanded Medicare and Social Security, an imbalance that led to an explosion of debt. Gibney points out that, when he was born, in 1976, the national debt was about a third the size of the annual economy. After decades of boomers at the helm, he says, it’s now some 130 percent.”
Well, there were those tax cuts – Reagan’s, Bush’s, Trump’s, with a lot of Ivy League/Wall Street Democrats being bipartisan, too. And Soloman’s unquestioning reference to Gibney’s criticism of “expanded Medicare and Social Security” should raise a red flag for any journalist following the debate over efforts to resolve imbalances in the programs, especially for women, minorities and low-income seniors. Who has lobbied against doing that, again? Does their birth year matter?
For part 2, Steinhorn’s defends the “Baby Boom legacy” like a champ. He notes that he wrote his book in the mid-2000s, when Boomer blame was well underway, he says: “Beating up on Baby Boomers, it’s sort of the last acceptable prejudice. You see all of these essays and all of these articles and all of these people going on TV criticizing baby boomers, as if they’re somehow singularly selfish or narcissistic or the me generation and all of that. And so I wanted to be able to correct the record, correct the history and put it in historical context.”
The adversarial approach to major, endemic economic ills as being perpetrated by one demographic group upon others is a sorry – but all too common — distraction from what the public needs to know. Boomers vs. Millennials – the facile framing is biased by its nature and ignores the system-wide examination of inequities that affect Americans across generations. It’s truly fake news, camouflaged with a check-box list of otherwise legitimate facts and interesting people.
Over two nights, the NewsHour showed superficially diverse faces, yet where was the discussion of age discrimination, of the struggles for older working-class Boomers and those even older, especially and women and minorities affected by systematic issues attributed in the series only as impacting young adults? Worse than a missed opportunity, the PBS series exploited, rather than exposed, the very idea of generational warfare for the inherently bogus and ageist blather it is.
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 2021 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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