GBO NEWS: On Gerontocracy Insider’s “Weird Al” Parody of In-Depth Reporting—The Old Russians Are Coming!; Harvard’s Journalist’s Resource Published Double Antidote to Ageism
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations.
December 7, 2022 — Volume 29, Number 13
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. NOTE ALSO: Some news links below hit paywalls and are inaccessible without subscriptions, although a number of those do allow free access to the first few stories.
In This Special Issue: As the Journalists Network on Generation (JNG, publisher of GBONews.org) winds down our 29th year, the contagion continues, not only Covid, but the media’s chronic affliction with ageism, the last acceptably open media bias. This special issue centers on perhaps the most peculiarly ambitious instances of anti-aging hubris we’ve seen on screen, from Insider. Fortunately, the folks at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, have provided a double antidote to the ageism infection with two stories of genuine value to journalists. Before year’s end, we plan to send readers a more newsy final GBONews for 2022. Then, on to our 30th year.
1. GOOD SOURCES
Harvard Educates Journalists on Aging, Ageism
GBONews was pleased to see Harvard’s Journalists Resource publish not one but two extensive pieces on covering generational issues, a research guide on ageism in health care, plus a reporter’s tip sheet with ideas on background and context from this editor and our colleague Liz Seegert, who edits the blog on aging for the Association of Health Care Journalists and co-directs our Journalists in Aging Fellows Program.
Both articles, which ran in mid-November, are by Kristen Senz, a frequent contributor to The Journalist’s Resource, a publication of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative.
*** “The Impact of Ageism on Health and Health Care: A research roundup and explainer,” ran Nov. 14, 2022, with the deck: “Ageism against older people results in negative health outcomes for individuals and society, research shows. But momentum is building for policies that take aim at age-based discrimination at the state and federal level.”
Senz included sources from last summer’s online panel discussion on ageism convened for the the Journalists in Aging Fellowship Program, our JNG/GBONews collaboration with the Gerontological Society of America.
The article quotes panelist Julie Ober Allen, PhD, co-author of research published last June in Jama Network exposing how “examples [of everyday ageism] are perceived as humorous or considerate or even complimentary, yet they strip older adults of their individuality, and they’re used to justify treating them with less respect and fewer rights.”
The essay also cites panel member Kevin Prindiville, executive director of Justice in Aging, a national legal advocacy organization, who said, “In broad economic terms, the consequences of ageism are astronomical, with one study by AARP estimating unrealized gross domestic product growth in the U.S. at $850 billion for 2018, due to discrimination against a burgeoning population of older workers. That figure could reach $3.9 trillion by 2050, according to the report. As a result, older Americans are increasingly experiencing housing vulnerability and homelessness, which greatly exacerbates negative health outcomes.”
The story also describes the “far-reaching California Master Plan for Aging,” one of a small handful done by states as models for developing a statewide aging-related policy agenda. Prindiville was member of the advisory committee that crafted the Master Plan.
Among other important sources, Senz also cited studies on the impact of ageism on longevity by Fellowship program keynoter, Yale’s Becca Levy, PhD, author of Breaking the Age Code (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2022).
*** “6 Tips for Improving News Coverage of Older People,” leads with, “From as early as age 3, people begin to form negative biases toward older people, research has shown, and as many as half of all people worldwide carry ageist beliefs. For journalists, recognizing inherent biases is key to producing better, deeper coverage of aging-related issues and stories involving older people.” The story quotes GBONews’ editor and Fellowship program co-director Seegert on such concerns as reporters’ use of terminology; pitfalls of stereotypes; and ways writers can “flip” a story’s narrative from the usual “damaging misperception” that older people are part of a monolith to a more nuances and varied picture.
Thanks to Senz and Journalist’s Resource editor Carmen Nobel for including us and, more significantly, devoting their resources to what continues to be a sleeper bias in American journalism.
2. AGEISM WATCH
Insider’s “Weird Al” Parody of Gerontocracy: A Media Midlife Crisis?
By Paul Kleyman
One would think the Democrats’ midterm success, with exit interviews showing voters heeded President Joe Biden’s calls to “preserve democracy” and appreciated his peripatetic accomplishments—whatever pollsters said about his approval rating—might have quelled the ageism that blared for months from bipartisan political pundits about Washington’s dilapidated “gerontocracy.”
Add to that the post-election torch-passing of powerful congressional positions by top Dems to the generation-in-waiting and observers might have expected old acquaintances to be (mostly) forgot at year’s end, and seldom brought to mind. Of course, the 2022 midterms were just as much about the 2024 finals—and the global president was about to turn 80. Rivals smelled blood, and media sniffed subscriptions.
What GBONews’ editor didn’t anticipate was that in the weeks leading up to the election, an otherwise respected news organization, Insider (businessinsider.com) would pile on a shipload of articles attacking Washington’s older political leadership, particularly in the Democratic Party.
Insider’s stack of stories, in some instances, present a near parody of in-depth journalism worthy of Weird Al Yankovic. One piece—I kid you not– is headlined, “Old Men Helped Cause the Soviet Union’s Collapse. Historians Say It’s a Warning Sign for the United States.” In fact, the article shows anything but that historical assessment.
The outcry from mainstream media and DC politicos, fretting about the Democratic Party’s presumed “gerontocracy” — leaders in their 70s and 80s – has echoed from the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall since last Spring in articles from New York Magazine to PBS’s Amanpour & Company. My hope that the ageist decibels would dissipate with a sigh of relief following the midterm vote quickly diminished as even stanch progressives, such as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, renewed his call for the president not to run again, mostly projected from his own pinches of aging at 76. Their pleas have not been based on Biden’s policies or globe-jetting vigor, but solely over fears that voters will worry that at age 86 by the end of a second term, the president will have diminished, or totter only a birthday away from dementia.
If you think GBONews had exhausted the topic of ageism in politics and the media with our extensive coverage last June (“Lazy Journalism and the Fallacy of Gerontocracy,” also in LA Progressive) I feel your issue fatigue.
As anti-ageism advocate Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks, A Manifesto Against Ageism, confided in a recent email, she’s “partly sick of the whole damn non-issue.” Her exasperated note, though, came with a link that could not be refused to a steaming heap of editorial age bias: Insider’s enterprise project, “Red, White and Gray: How America’s Gerontocracy is Weakening Democracy.”
GBONews might well have designated gerontocracy as its word of the year, but accepts second place to the choice of Merriam-Webster, gaslighting. That’s because the Washington establishment has gaslit itself into believing, individual merit or criticism aside, leadership after 70 necessarily portends a slide into mental decline. Forget congressional experience or presidential perspicacity. It’s as if the Berkshire Hathaway directors told Warren Buffet, 92, to keep his investment advice to himself, or Houston Astros’ ownership made manager Dusty Baker to take his World Series ring home because, you know, next year he’ll be 74.
Business Insider’s “Red, White & Gray”
Insider posted “Red, White and Gray” in bulk from Sept. 13 through October 2022, with the dek: “How America’s Gerontocracy is Weakening Democracy.” The project’s title page states, “America’s leaders are old and getting older. And across Congress, the judiciary, and the executive branch, government is becoming less and less reflective of the youthful society it represents. . . ” Following that, the usually reliable news organization asserts, “When government grows old: Investigating the price that’s paid when aged leaders lead a youthful nation.”
So multifaceted are the story angles that I found myself wondering if they might be on to something. Does age alone signal no difference between, say, Democrats Sen. Diane Feinstein, 88, of California, widely reported to be struggling with her duties, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 73, who first won her Senate seat from Massachusetts only a decade ago and is as sharp of mind in interviews as her tongue is quick with a plan?
Insider’s stacked cargo of gerontocracy stories includes: 31 articles and six infographics, produced by a Carnival Cruise crew of 15 writers under seven editors, a data editor, a team of 13 designers and artists, two video producers, a squad of eight on distribution and communications–and four copy editors, all under the direction of Project Editor Dave Levinthal, in his early 40s.
After reading a range of project stories and scanning others whose “Key Findings” are power-pointed in a summary piece, I found nothing new or persuasive, and much to be irrelevant to any understanding of flaws in the US political system.
Some pieces are actually so well reported at length with contrasting viewpoints, they negate the premise of old age as a desultory political influence–before they conclude by conjecturing about the likely decay fated to result from elder entrenchment in the seats of power.
All of the Insider article links are neatly stacked up like shipping containers on the gerontocracy project’s main page, each with its own illustrated rectangle, ready for unloading to readers and news affiliates. One illustrates a becloaked Sen. Bernie Sanders, 81, caricatured in a forebodingly medieval scene for a piece headlined, “America’s Government Is Older Than Ever, So We Made This ‘Dungeons & Dragons’-Inspired Tabletop Role-Playing Game to Show you Why the System Favors Gerontocracy.”
Or how about the row of missing-child milk cartons drawn to depict the story, “Gen X Is Late to the Leadership Table in US Politics, Prompting the Question: Will It Ever Produce a President?”
Hmm. Would anyone have thought three years ago that Kamala Harris, 58, would be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk? And in the wings of the West Wing, couldn’t Insider see Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, 40, or Sen. Cory Booker, 53, D-NJ, both serious candidates in 2020. On the GOP side of the aisle, White House wishfuls, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 44, or Sen. Marco Rubio, 51, may need to skirt the power of the 76-year-old man of MAGA with the aid of septuagenarian Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The article “Old Men Helped Cause the Soviet Union’s Collapse” is so bizarre, reporter John Haltiwanger took pains to clarify that, as he quoted an expert source, “Economic stagnation and unsustainable levels of military spending were probably far more to blame” than the long-ensconced denizens of the Politburo. Haltiwanger does provide an excellent historical precis of the Soviet Union’s decline, but the essay’s framing collapses as it tries to presents the collapsing government’s calcified leadership as “a cautionary tale for the US, whose leaders have been in power for decades.”
Insider’s attempted revision of Soviet history brings to mind the classic verse, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost / . . . For want of a horse the battle was lost” with the ultimate loss being the kingdom itself, all for lack of a nail. But what of that unsustainable military spending and, say, Russia’s dependency on oil when crude priced plummeted in the early 1990s crashing its economy?
Instead of militating for more nails, Insider might better devote as many editorial resources to genuinely compelling concerns, starting with the long-term effects of bloated military budgets and continued petroleum dependency. Insider’s obsession with “gerontocracy”–from dictatorial Soviet decrepitude to the drag on Washington’s democratic institutions–is as cartoonishly long a stretch as Putin’s 13-foot meeting table.
Follow the Dark Money
Every institution struggles against the entropic decay from stagnant oversight when there’s no apparent line of succession, but while Insider reports on the challenges some congressional staff have in keeping their members on track, the many astute senior leaders in Congress are politically as far afield from each other as Democratic January 6 Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, or GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In some cases the power problem is not longevity but a depth of shrewdness.
Then there’s the Insider story headlined, “Old Money: How Retirees Are Funding and Fueling Political Candidates Unlike Ever Before.” The piece asserts, “Retirees are becoming one of the most powerful political financial forces in the nation as they spend their savings to fuel federal-level campaigns.” The story reports that the organization OpenSecrets determined “more than 1 million retired people contributed to congressional campaigns and political committees,” in 2019-2020.
Older people do tend to have more discretionary funds on hand and more time for making donations. The story, though, omits mention the overwhelming political contributions of ultra-right billionaires Rebekah Mercer, age 48, Peter Thiel, 55, or newly declared Republican, Elon Musk, 51. Nor does the story mention the likes of Gen Xer Leonard Leo, 57, whom the Guardian called “the secretive right winger using billions to reshape America.” The left has a few, of course, George Soros, 92, or Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, 38.
Beyond its occasional stories on the rule of dark money in US politics, perhaps the Insider could devote its full reporting force to that issue, comparable to what it’s done to pick on older Americans? How about a major investigation into the long-term consequences of income inequality and health insecurity in this rapidly aging country?
Ancestry.Huh!
There’s an oddly revealing moment during the Insider video titled, “Here’s What Descendants of 5 Former Presidents Say About the Role Age Plays in Politics.” The website’s DC Bureau Chief Darren Samuelsohn appears to be having a great time on this Sunday-morning-TV slouch away from substantive reporting, as he interviews the descendants of past presidents “to see how age has historically played a role in shaping US political policies.”
Samuelsohn begins by explaining that it’s part of Insider’s “deep dive into America’s gerontocracy. And how we got here: What are the costs, and what are the benefits of having so many aged leaders in our country?” Although the story does nothing of the sort, the interviews do expose surprises, both about Insider’s loaded intentions in Samuelsohn chats with relatives of Jimmy Carter, Teddy Roosevelt, John Tyler, John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft, who also served as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
In the most awkward moment of the entire Insider project, Samuelsohn exposes the speciousness permeating their gerontocracy slant. He asks Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, niece of President John F. Kennedy, the youngest president on being elected in 1960, “Do you think age is a problem for Democrats?” Townsend, who served as Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, immediate replies, “Nancy Pelosi, as I said, is the best Speaker, I think, we’ve ever had. So, clearly, no!” One would expect die-hard Republicans to say as much about the cunning prowess of Sen. Mitch McConnell, 87.
Samuelsohn queries Patricia M. Taft, 37, great-granddaughter of President Taft, whether “the age of our leaders currently in America is a problem, or is it an asset for American democracy.” Taft responds, “Diversity of any kind is great, I think you don’t want all of our leaders of a single generation. . . . I think we need a thread to be woven.” But the summary bullet point Insider printed on the video’s web page tells readers that she said, “Gen X is ‘pretty thirsty and ready to take the reins.’”
The “Young Bloods”
Race on Capitol Hill is the subject of another gerontocracy article, headed, “Young Black Activists Are Done Waiting Their Turn for Political Office. They’re taking on the ‘John Lewis generation’ of elder lawmakers who they say are out of touch.”
Like many of the project’s reporters, Elvina Nawaguna provides a lengthy backgrounder on her assigned subject, underscoring another complicated side to the project’s ageist scaffolding: While some have called for Black elders to make way for “young blood,” she reports, “There’s no denying the power senior members like Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-SC, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, [wield]. They’ve built the Congressional Black Caucus into a crucial voting bloc that can torpedo legislation and were credited with helping Joe Biden win in 2020.” Adept leaders, or mere speedbumps to a younger vanguard, which is it?
I wondered whether Insider and other major media outlets that have promoted the fallacy of gerontocratic intransigence might take credit for the post-midterm election’s changing of the Democratic guard.
The complaints about Washington’s gerontocracy target the locution’s first part, from Greek geronto, meaning old, but what about the second term: -cracy = rule? Were the Demo-cratic Party control as immobile as, say, Russia’s kleptocracy of Putin’s oligarchs, would so much kvetching have been sufficient to advance the next generation? Pelosi noted to the New York Times that the party has been mentoring new leadership for some time. And in late November, Clyburn told NPR’s Deirdre Walsh that “shifting power to younger leaders is something the House Democratic Caucus has been moving towards for years.”
Of course, Clyburn’s decision to step down as his party’s Whip, while remaining in top leadership as Assistant Democratic Leader, disappointed some of the “young bloods.” But party leaders created the new Democratic Policy and Communications Committee chairmanship for Colorado Rep. Joe Neguse, 38, whom Axios reported “had been expected to step into the No. 4 role.” Other younger Dems also rose in leadership positions besides the new Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, 52, include Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark, 59, as Minority Whip, and California’s Pete Aguilar, 43, the new chairman of the Dem Party Caucus.
And newly welcomed to the House floor only days before his 26th birthday will be Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, “the first member of Gen Z to be elected to Congress,” as NPR News reported.
Insider showed that the post-election affect in their Dec. 4, 2022, story calculating that the median age of the new 118th Congress will dip by 2.5 years, to 59.2. The article goes on to note that by the 2024 election, the 535 members under the Capitol dome will set an age record, as if greater maturity and experience in our age of longevity were a bad thing.
As for the presumption of freshness and innovation among younger bloods, how about contrasting the capabilities of someone like Jeffries or Clark, with MAGA firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-CO, 35. How the GOP’s Rep. Kevin McCarthy, 57, likely the new House Speaker, although he’s struggled to win the 218 votes he needs. Certainly, he’s been a skilled vote counter, but you be hard-pressed to find political pundits touting his leadership qualities given his dissembling following the Jan. 6 insurrection.
80 Isn’t the New Crazy
As this editor scanned through articles highlighted in the piece, “’Red, White, and Gray’: Key Findings from Insider’sInvestigation Into the United States’ gerontocracy,” I found myself searching in vain for any claim or framing that hasn’t long been contested by experts in aging as merely speculative or subjective, at best.
For instance, the article charting the sharply increased prevalence of dementia among people past age 80 spotlights anecdotal cases of mental decline among life-tenured federal judges. Yet, as distinguished Yale psychologist Becca Levy, PhD, 55, notes in her book, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs about Aging Determine How Long & Well You Live” (Morrow/Harper Collins, 2022), “Dementia is not a normal part of aging . . . Only about 3.6 percent of US adults age 65 to 75 have dementia. Further, there is evidence that dementia rates have been declining over time.”
Among numerous experts Salon’s Matthew Rozsa interviewed for “Biden Is Now America’s First Octogenarian President,” Nov. 26, 2022), geriatrician Louise Aronson, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, “noted that among octogenarians, researchers and actuaries will divide people into three groups — the top 25%, the bottom 25% and everyone in the middle — and find significant differences in life expectancy within those groups. One cannot merely say that, because a person is over 80, that means they are automatically cognitively and physically unfit.
Aronson, author of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Elderhood, continued, “While an 80-year-old living in poverty and with no support system has bleak prospects, an 80-year-old with wealth and power (such as a sitting president with nearly a half-century experience in Washington) could actually be just fine. Statistics used to fuel predictions become less reliable due to that important piece of context.” She stated, “To the extent the media focuses on age primarily, they are engaging in ageism.”
More generally, all of the blather about the advanced age of political leaders begs examination of individual’s experience. New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, 61, explained in “President Biden Is Turning 80. Experts Say Age Is More Than a Number” (Nov. 19, 2022) that the Times “spoke to 10 experts in aging to paint a picture of what the next six years might look like for a person of the president’s age.”
Well balanced with acknowledgement of the vicissitudes of old age, Stolberg’s sources consistently reflect that of renown psychiatrist, Dr. Dilip Jeste, a who has studied aging at the University of California, San Diego: “This idea that old age is associated with only declines is not true.”
The ever succinct anti-ageism advocate, Ashton Applewhite, told Rosza, “Benjamin Franklin was 81 when he played a critical role in the Constitutional Convention.” She added, “The issue is capacity, not age.”
The Narrative on the Bus
Others may conjecture about the intentions of Business Insider’s editorial management in deploying their armada of ageist effronteries. As to the damaging effects of intuitive but false premises on American politics, though, veteran journalist James Fallows observed to On the Media’s (Nov. 18, 2022) Brooke Gladstone, “There seems also to be a sort of self-sustaining narrative within a number of the political press corps that my good friend Timothy Crouse wrote about 50 years ago.” In his book on the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, Crouse exposed how reporters would ask a respected correspondent what a speech by President Richard Nixon or his opponent, George McGovern, was about. He’d say, “Yeah, the speech was X.”
Fallows went on, “That became kind of the narrative. And we have the modern era of that. I think where certain narratives ‘Biden is unpopular,’ it’s all about ‘prices at the pump.’ ‘Trump is unstoppable.’ They became the modern version of the boys on the bus.”
Offering his “post-midterm narrative,” Fallows stated his strong opposition to the media’s “looking instantly to the 2024 lineup. If there were a single thing I could change about the political press corps, it would be to reduce by about 90% the effort, space, assignments, energy, etc., to what is going to happen two years from now or four years from now and switching them instead to what is happening right now. If you look back to any previous presidential election and try to correlate what is said right after the midterms with what happens two years later, there’s basically zero correlation.”
In targeting presumably intransigent elder Democrats, with a few obligatory frowny faces to those across the partisan aisle, Insider and other major media have failed American journalism more fundamentally than what I could satirize as “The Big Old Lie.” Their default to the easy, one-word meme merely derails editorial resources—and the public’s right to know—from clear-eyed investigations of issues that have truly pushed democracy to the brink.
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 2022 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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Joanne Lynn
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Ruth Taber