GBO NEWS: Poynter’s MediaWise for Seniors vs, Fake News; NBC’s Al Roker Splashes Back at Ageism; NYT on Phony Nursing Home Diagnosis to Drug Elders; KALW Hits Hospital Disability Bias in Pandemic; Social Security Report and You; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Our 28th Year.
September 17, 2021 — Volume 28, Number 10
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: Is Nicki Minaj Getting Swollen Coverage?
1. MEDIA WISE FOR SENIORS FIGHTS FAKE WITH FACT: Poynter Institute Program Educates Older Americans to Tell True News from False (Beware the ‘Pink Slime”)
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Nargis Hakim Rahman on Detroit Public TV Forum on Covering Bangladeshi Families During COVID; *** Time Mag’s Jay Newton-Small Receives Distinguished Ambassador In Aging Award; *** Al Roker’s “Screw You!” to “Ageist” Tweets That He’s “too old” for Hurricane Ida Reporting.
3. THE STORYBOARD:
*** “Phony Diagnoses Hide High Rates of Drugging at Nursing Homes,” by Katie Thomas, Robert Gebeloff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, New York Times;
*** “‘Not Worth The Resources’: How The Pandemic Revealed Existing Biases Against The Disability Community,” by Christopher Egusa, KALW Public Radio;
*** “’Living and Not Living’: COVID’s Toll on Alzheimer’s Patients and the Spouses home with them,” by Maria Sestito, Palm Springs Desert Sun/Gannett;
*** “What the New Outlook for Social Security Means for You,” by Chris Farrell, PBS Next Avenue.
1. MEDIAWISE FOR SENIORS: FACT vs. FAKE
*** Separating Fact from Fake Among Retirees – A Job for Poynter Institute’s MediaWise for Seniors – or Maybe Love?
In the 2019 film, The Tomorrow Man, John Lithgow plays Ed, a widowed retiree preoccupied with online “prepper” conspiracy groups focused on preparing for the coming apocalypse. The film, with touching and thoughtful performances by Lithgow and Blythe Danner, is set a few years prior to today’s fake-news glut.
The movie’s depiction of late-life love, shyly and slyly exposes the challenges of years’ long loneliness as it defaults to unhealthy routines and desultory habits. while Lithgow’s Ed loops through his nihilistic fears and fantasies, while Danner’s Ronnie has fallen into a pattern of hoarding. Both initially hit a wall of resistance thwarting their hopes of changing the other’s entrenched quirks.
This indie film’s title evolves with sweet irony as Ed find himself having to choose between incessant planning for a catastrophic tomorrow, his garage packed with years’ worth of canned goods, batteries and the like, versus one so unexpected glimmering with happiness — but only if he can puncture his survivalist trepidations like a can of pork ‘n’ beans.
The Tomorrow Man’s romantic antidote to later life loneliness and fake news may not inoculate every isolated senior addicted to the freshest online or Fox News outrage, but short of offering another elder version of Tinder, serious efforts to address old-age isolation may offer many a more hopeful – and accurate — perspective.
Unsurprisingly, surveys have shown that more than ever, social media rapidly escalates elders’ embrace of the wildest claims. A study of online sharing of unfounded conspiracy claims in the wake of the 2016 election revealed that although the practice was rare, “On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group” in the survey.
And just this past week, Axios’ Sara Fischer and Neal Rothschild reported Sept. 14, the day of California’s recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom, “Even without access to the major social media platforms to amplify them,” Donald Trump’s unrelenting claims of voting fraud gives “conservative pundits and politicians license to use the ‘Big Lie’ falsehood to preemptively undermine any election, which could impact voter turnout.”
They reported, “Data from Zignal Labs, a social media intelligence firm, finds that between June 1 and September 1, mentions of things like ‘fraud,’ election ‘rigging’ or ‘stealing ballots’ received hundreds of thousands of mentions, with occurrences spiking in the past two weeks.”
Even though the recall effort failed in the end, those numbers are sobering. So are the truly life-threatening figures for spread of the Delta variant by the often-misled unvaccinated. Aside from the relatively small number of older adults caught up in nefarious speculation, many seniors are simply baffled by what news is true, what’s false—and how to tell allegations apart.
Pink Slime
Lurking in the shadows of accuracy is not the threat of Tomorrow Man’s apocalypse, but “pink slime,” says Katy Byron, director the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise program. “I’m not talking about the stuff that makes hot dogs. I’m talking about fake local news websites that push misinformation, nicknamed ‘pink slime’ because they try to mimic the look of credible sources like your local news.”
Byron told GBONews.org in an email, “These sites are full of hyper-partisan or misleading stories trying to influence you, and they’re common. Columbia University researchers tracking pink slime sites say hundreds have popped up this year.” The Columbia Journalism Review reported on the study results last year.
Generations-beat writers worried about the inundation of misinformation on voting, climate change and health – some of it literally killing thousands per day from the Delta variant — may want to tell your audiences about MediaWise for Seniors.
The nonprofit Poynter Institute, a leading journalism educator, initiated MediaWise for young news consumers in 2018. Then, as evidence mounted showing older-adult susceptibility to bad information with the presidential campaign and onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Poynter started MediaWise for Seniors in June 2020 to counter the “infodemic” of misinformation.
To reach large numbers of older Americans, Poynter partnered with AARP and Facebook and, says Byron, has so far reached more than 680,000 Americans, 50 years and older. Older Americans are increasingly engaged online, she emphasized, with more than 40% of people over 65 actively using social media platforms like Facebook, as well as many promoting conspiracies, scams, hoaxes and false news stories.
Byron went on, “Some of our most successful and high impact projects include our social media-based PSA graphics, online self-guided and live courses, Facebook live events and AARP Virtual Community Center and tele-town hall events.”
In addition, she said, they’ve managed to teach many hard-to-reach seniors, including those with no internet access: “We reached 25,000 landlines with our AARP tele-town hall in May 2021, teaching digital media literacy skills and how to spot misinformation related to COVID-19 and vaccines — that event featured MediaWise Ambassador and former ABC News Good Morning America anchor Joan Lunden. We also partnered with AARP for a training piece in the Bulletin print magazine, which reaches an audience of 30.4 million.”
Lunden, along with CNN and PBS’s Christiane Amanpour, head an all-star case of 20 MediaWise public awareness “Ambassadors” for its youth and adult programs. Some others are NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt, PBS NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz, and TikTok Creator/Washington Post writer Dave Jorgenson.
The program also collaborated with the Stanford Social Media Lab, which conducted independent research on the effectiveness of the online MediaWise for Seniors fact-checking course. “Researchers found that 85% of students were able to accurately identify disinformation after the course,” Byron said.
Making News Harder to Abuse
Working with AARP, Byron said, “We developed a training template for their local offices, which they can use to reach folks at a local level virtually or hopefully soon in person.” Also,
Facebook supported multiple live events and advertising campaigns on the platform to reach social-media savvy older Americans.”
MediaWise now offers a free online fact-checking course developed for seniors along with their other online educational resources:
- How to Spot Misinformation Online: a 90-minute course teaching simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information.
- Our MediaWise Ambassadors teach various fact-checking techniques via YouTube
- Seniors can learn how to fact-check from our Teen Fact-Checking Network content
- Full hub of MediaWise educational resources here.
- The AARP Fact Tracker, a MediaWise-partnered product, has interactive digital media lessons
Byron noted, “We are currently developing resources for Spanish-speakers based in the US and working on a pilot program to bring our seniors’ educational resources to a number of countries abroad.”
Meanwhile, she said, the most effective way for journalists on aging to confront the firestorm of baseless information is “to be transparent and thorough in reporting on misinformation.” Bryon advised, “Walk your aging readers through exactly how you debunked a piece of misinformation,” such as through a series of Google queries.
Also, she said, “Put your reporting on misinformation in context: Discuss why they might be inclined to believe misleading headlines, such as that they confirm readers’ worldview or create an emotional response that leads to kneejerk social sharing. And explain why they see misinformation in the first place (algorithms).”
Byron stressed, “Always come back to why it all matters — we cite the events of Jan. 6, as a real-life consequence of misinformation, but the pandemic itself shows how misinformation can kill.” Reporters can contact the MediaWise for Seniors expert staff for story context and quotes by emailing Alex Perez aperez@poynter.org.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Multimedia Dynamo Nargis Hakim Rahman spoke on Detroit Public TV early-prime-time “Public Forum,” Sept. 7, to discuss her series about her series on the challenges of caregiving that Bangladeshi families have faced in the pandemic. She appeared with Serena Maria Daniels, her editor at the popular Tostada Magazine. Other panelists also examined physical burdens, economic hardship, loneliness and depression confronting older adults and their caregivers.
The program, a live virtual public forum, was presented by the New York & Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative with host, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stephen Henderson. Rahman’s two-parter had support from a 2020 Journalists in Aging Fellowship, and the Solutions Journalism Network helped fund the translations into Bangla and pay for artwork.
Rahman’s series was published in July and included: “How One Bangladeshi Family’s Lifeline of Support Was Disrupted by the Pandemic,”: Read Bangla Translation, and Part 2 — “Tag-Team Approach to Healthcare Teaches Older Adults in Bangladeshi Community During COVID-19 Pandemic,” both Tostada Magazine (Bangla translation).
*** Jay Newton-Small Received the 2021 Distinguished Ambassador In Aging Award from the Aging Life Care Association as co-founder of MemoryWell, a national network of more than 700 professional writers who craft life stories and family histories of seniors in memory-care and related facilities “to help improve their care and chronicle their unique stories,” according to the association’s announcement.
Newton-Small, who provided care for her father when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, is was a Washington political correspondent for years at Time Magazine, where she remains a contributor. She also wrote the 2016 bestseller, Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works. The association site says, “Her work with MemoryWell advances the importance of helping older adults’ quality-of-life experiences with stories that can be shared with family and care providers.”
*** “Screw You!” That was the retort of NBC weather ninja Al Roker to all the “well intentioned” but “ageist” viewers of his Hurricane Ida reports. Many questioned whether a man of his age should be seen pummeled on screen by sea surges in Louisiana as the storm hit the shore. Mashable posted, “Famed reporter and weather forecaster Al Roker is down in Louisiana doing his job as Hurricane Ida approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast. And hey, guess what? He’d like you to keep your ageist concerns about that to yourself.”
In one of many clips, Roker doesn’t miss a beat — or a fact — as he grips his mike while being buffeted by buckets worth of water tossed on him, as he broadcasts just over a railing along Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain. Mashablereported that the clip “went viral on Sunday” as people from all over voiced concern for the 67-year-old weather beater. The piece added, “Yeah, it’s wild weather all around him in this footage. But don’t forget, this is Roker’s job. He’s really good at it.”
According to Mashable, one viewer Tweeted, “Al Roker is too old for this shit. Get that man into a hotel. He can tell me about the weather from there.” Reacting to this and “scores of other, similar tweets,” Roker replied, “’I volunteered to come out here. This is what I do. I’ve done this for 40 years.” He reassured viewers, “We all make sure we’re safe, we’re not going to do something that’s gonna put ourselves in harm’s way.” As to those who called him “too old,” he Tweeted this retort: “Hey, guess what? Screw you! Keep up. Keep up. These young punks, I will come after them. I will drop them like a bag of dirt.’” Whew!
3. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Phony Diagnoses Hide High Rates of Drugging at Nursing Homes,” by Katie Thomas, Robert Gebeloff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, New York Times (Sept. 11, 2021, also the topic of NYT’s30-min podcast, The Daily, Sept. 14): Deck — “At least 21 percent of nursing home residents are on antipsychotic drugs, a Times investigation found.” With this lead story for its Sunday edition, the paper exposes the latest iterations of the long-term care (LTC) industry’s deviousness in drugging residents into docility, in order to minimize the cost of hiring adequate staff to safely care for patients.
The article’s stomach-turning revelations include that LTC companies have gained higher than truthful quality ratings in Medicare’s 5-star system by misdiagnosing many residents who have dementia as being “schizophrenic.” Doing so enables the homes to use otherwise prohibited drugs as chemical restraints to quiet resident. That’s because the regulations allow antipsychotics to used unrecorded for FDA-approved diagnoses, such as schizophrenia: They don’t then raise a red flag in patient records for Medicare and Medicaid inspections.
In reality, it would be a rare diagnosis in older people with no past bouts with schizophrenia, but facility doctors list it in order to prescribe certain antipsychotics—drugs with no evidence of treating dementia, but which may harm patients while also making them very drowsy and easy for staff to handle. Among the misused pharmaceuticals are Haldol, Zyprexa, and the sleeping pill Ambien.
The story explains, “Antipsychotic drugs — which for decades have faced criticism as “chemical straitjackets” — are dangerous for older people with dementia, nearly doubling their chance of death from heart problems, infections, falls and other ailments.”
The NYT story goes on, “Medicare and industry groups also said they had made real progress toward reducing antipsychotic use in nursing homes, pointing to a significant drop since 2012 in the share of residents on the drugs. But when residents with diagnoses like schizophrenia are included, the decline is less than half what the government and industry claim. And when the pandemic hit in 2020, the trend reversed and antipsychotic drug use increased.”
What’s more, says the Times investigation, “As the U.S. government has tried to limit the use of antipsychotic drugs, nursing homes have turned to other chemical restraints. Depakote, a medication to treat epilepsy and bipolar disorder, is one increasingly popular choice. The drug can make people drowsy and increases the risk of falls. Peer-reviewed studies have shown that it does not help with dementia, and the government has not approved it for that use.”
The article cites analysis by California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, which has long campaigned against the abuse of such restraints, about inappropriate drugging of residents with Depakote. The group’s lead lawyer, Anthony Chicotel, said, “It’s a drug that’s tailor-made to chemically restrain residents without anybody knowing.”
The story adds, “In the early 2000s, Depakote’s manufacturer, Abbott Laboratories, began falsely pitching the drug to nursing homes as a way to sidestep the 1987 law prohibiting facilities from using drugs as “chemical restraints,” according to a federal whistle-blower lawsuit filed by a former Abbott saleswoman. . . Abbott settled the lawsuit in 2012, agreeing to pay the government $1.5 billion to resolve allegations that it had improperly marketed the drugs, including to nursing homes.”
The nursing home industry’s response to public concerns, according to the Times: “In 2019, the main lobbying group for for-profit nursing homes, the American Health Care Association, published a brochure titled “Nursing Homes: Times Have Changed.” It asserts, “Nursing homes have replaced restraints and antipsychotic medications with robust activity programs, religious services, social workers and resident councils so that residents can be mentally, physically and socially engaged.”
The Times story goes on, “Last year, though, the industry teamed up with drug companies and others to push Congress and federal regulators to broaden the list of conditions under which antipsychotics don’t need to be publicly disclosed. . . ‘It is time for [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] to re-evaluate its regulations,’ wrote Jim Scott, the chairman of the Alliance for Aging Research, which is coordinating the campaign. The lobbying was financed by drug companies including Avanir Pharmaceuticals and Acadia Pharmaceuticals. . . . (In 2019, Avanir agreed to pay $108 million to settle charges that it had inappropriately marketed its drug for use in dementia patients in nursing homes.)”
*** “‘Not Worth The Resources’: How The Pandemic Revealed Existing Biases Against The Disability Community,” by Christopher Egusa, KALW Public Radio (Sept. 7, 2021, 15:48 min. audio with transcript): San Francisco’s KALW, in its “Crosscurrents” daily magazine show, is continuing its superb coverage of social issues long ignored by mainstream media with in-depth stories on aging in disability. In recent weeks, with a helping hand from a USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism fellowship, Egusa has been digging in to stories of the 7 million Californians with disabilities and their families, who feel the health care systems designed to protect them have failed them.
In this story, Egusa, who has an unspecified chronic condition, penetrated a grave injustice that only briefly made the news during the initial pandemic surge. Overwhelmed hospitals had to consider how best to triage patients given limited ICU staff, beds and ventilators.
He quotes Jessica Lehman, executive director of Senior Disability Action, who has a neuromuscular condition: “I think in the COVID pandemic we saw the most horrible manifestation of ableism and ageism that I’ve ever seen.”
A critical battleground for advocates, such as Lehman, was the state’s Crisis Standards of Care, a document similar to those in other states – and countries, such as Italy. The California policy directed hospitals and doctors on how to ration scarce medical care in determining who gets treatment and who doesn’t?
Egusa, notes, “Across the U.S., ICU beds and ventilators started running low, prompting many states, including California, to review their emergency plans and update their Crisis Standards of Care. California’s guidelines left the door open for elderly and disabled people to be denied care in favor of someone younger or able-bodied.”
Lehman stated, “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness, so I could get COVID and I could go to the hospital. And they might say, ‘We don’t have enough ICU beds or ventilators and because you have a disability, you don’t get one.’ And that would be a death sentence.” Sha and other advocates successfully campaigned to change California’s misguided state guideline.
KALW also ran Egusa’s separate 7-min. piece, “A Disabled Physician Works To Minimize The Healthcare Gap For People With Disabilities,” as well as the 24-minute story (with transcript) “COVID-19 Is Exposing The Caregiving Crisis, Leaving Disabled People And Their Families Desperate.
Meanwhile, longtime KALW reporter Angela Johnston continued her coverage of homeless people with Shelter-In-Place Hotels Offer Unlikely Health Benefits For Houseless Seniors (Aug. 31, 2021m, 10:36 mins): “In San Francisco where more than 30% of unhoused people are older than 50, there’s very little specialized care for unhoused people with serious age-related illnesses. But, the pandemic provided an unlikely opportunity to pave the way toward housing as health care.”
*** “’Living and not living’: COVID’s toll on Alzheimer’s Patients and the Spouses Home With Them,” by Maria Sestito, Palm Springs Desert Sun/Gannett (Sept. 13, 2021): The story, part of a series supported by the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program, leads with, “Frances Miller spent her working life as an occupational therapist, seeing the effects an Alzheimer’s diagnosis had on individuals. Still, those eight hours a day couldn’t prepare her for what it was like to have the progressive brain disease hit her own family. ‘Now it’s a 36-hour day and then some,’ Miller said,” since her husband, Bob, was first diagnosed with the disease in 2015.
Until COVID-19 hit, Sestito writes, “Support groups and activities offered by local organizations have been integral to the Millers’ lives. Their days and nights are spent surrounded by their new friends — other couples going through similar things, like John and Gail Loeschhorn — playing bingo at Alzheimer’s Coachella Valley and going out to dinner in Palm Springs. Even five years into his diagnosis, Bob was still volunteering at the Tolerance Education Center in Rancho Mirage. ‘When COVID hit, that volunteer job disappeared,’ Frances said. ‘He was 1,000 times better than he is now — mentally. He’s gone from mild to middle going towards end-middle.’”
In June, the piece adds, patients and families in the Coachella Valley were relieved when some adult day centers and support groups started meeting in person again. “But, with the Delta variant leading to more COVID-19 infections in Riverside County and beyond, not everyone is sure they can come back. . . . It’s a double-edged sword: Trying to keep people safe from infection and trying to combat the effects of isolation. Meanwhile, caregivers are left to use what resources they can, mostly the internet.”
*** “What the New Outlook for Social Security Means for You,” by Chris Farrell, PBS Next Avenue (Sept. 1, 2021): The 2021 annual report from the Social Security Trustees examines solvency issues for Social Security and Medicare, showing “the depletion date for the combined trust funds —retirement and disability — is 2033 without any changes to program benefits. That would be when today’s 54-year-olds reach Social Security’s Full Retirement Age. Still, that’s one year earlier than last year’s 2034 estimate.”
Farrell emphasizes that the “depletion date or insolvency doesn’t mean bankruptcy — far from it. Funding from payroll tax receipts will be enough to pay 78% of promised benefits after the combined Social Security trust funds depletion date is reached. ‘The trust fund report should be seen as a strength,’ says Eric Kingson, professor of social work and public administration at Syracuse University and co-author with Nancy Altman of Social Security Works for Everyone: Protecting and Expanding the Insurance Americans Love and Count On.” Altman, president of Social Security Works, also chairs the Strengthen Social Security Coalition and is “a rumored possible Biden appointee to run the Social Security Administration.”
He continues, “But the Social Security Trustees are strikingly cautious about their estimates involving the impact of the pandemic on the Social Security trust fund and its sister trust fund for Medicare, the federal health insurance program primarily for people 65 and older. Despite the dry language of actuaries, the uncertainty is apparent.”
Farrell acknowledges, “To be sure, a number of leading Republicans still want to cut Social Security retirement benefits to reduce the impending shortfall. Their latest maneuver is what’s known as The TRUST Act, sponsored by Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. He quotes Bob Blancato, a leading Democratic advocate for older Americans, “The concern seems to be they would look to cuts first, versus a more comprehensive approach.”
Farrell emphasizes, “A more comprehensive approach could include tax increases for the wealthy and technical changes to the Social Security system. . . Something else that’s different is that liberals are no longer trying to simply stave off benefit cuts and preserve the program exactly as it is — the main tactic since Republican Newt Gingrichwas House Majority Leader in the mid-1990s. They have bigger and bolder ideas.”
In addition, he writes, “The political story about Medicare is less about its projected 2026 shortfall and more about momentum toward expanding the program. The Biden administration has proposed adding hearing, visual and dental care to Medicare benefits, something also being pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) At this time, it’s unclear how those new benefits would be paid for, though they wouldn’t affect the trust fund.”
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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