GBO NEWS: McConnell, Feinstein–80 as New Fear Factor; Black Military Women; Oklahoma Parkinson’s Alliance; Few Cancer-Risk Patients in Drug Trials; Race Bias in Menopause Studies; Climate Change and Mental Health; Living With Arthritis; Isolated in Colorado; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations.
July 31, 2023 — Volume 30, Number 8
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 Issue: How to weaponize anti-ageism? Cover aging.
1. JOURNALISM’S LAZY AGEISM (AGAIN): 80 IS THE NEW FEAR FACTOR: *** Media’s age obsession (McConnell, Feinstein, Biden) supersedes actual political reporting
2. THE STORYBOARD: Summer Story Links from the Journalists in Aging Fellows from Black Military Women to Climate Change & Mental Health
3. THE BOOKMOBILE: *** MacArthur “Genius” M.T. Connolly’s The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life (Public Affairs/Hachette).
4 GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Age Boom Fellowships Top 100 Applications; *** GBONews Editor in Zoom Advises American Society on Aging Members on Bettering Media Relations.
1. JOURNALISM’S LAZY AGEISM (AGAIN): 80, THE NEW FEAR FACTOR
Eighty is the new Fear Factor. Instead of eating poached cow brains or sticking their head in boxes of insects, national media journalists are petrified when top political leaders cross that dreaded threshold of age 80. What’s being lost in this contagious memory loss by political journalists is reporting on the actual politics of the moment.
Be there no mistake, as someone who is 78, this editor feels every back twinge or instance of indigestion as clock tick toward my mortal uncoiling. But it’s another matter to extend my pangs or those of media-exposed politicians to the fortitude and future of the Free World, with “new blood” as the elixir of salvation. The result is not merely an age concern but projected ageism – if my energy is waning, how can he last much longer as president? I mean, didn’t NBC News just show the pictures of him tripping over a sandbag and walking stiffly?
That 80 is the new Fear Factor became sharply evident last week with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s20-second freeze during his July 27 press conference. Compounding concern over that incident was Sen. Diane Feinstein’s confused moment during a defense vote. These moments drew understandable sympathy across party lines. Both senators have experienced unsettling health issues over the past couple of year, including McConnell, 81,with multiple falls, one causing a concussion, and Feinstein, 90, having endured a debilitating bout with shingles following many reports of her memory lapses.
But almost none of the age reporting has reviewed the political machinations of the moment. Sen. Feinstein, who will now retire at the end of her term, offered, only months ago to step aside from her position on the Judiciary Committee, after her absence suspended votes on federal judges, because of the Democrats’ slim majority.
Yet, Sen. McConnell indicated that he’d block a new Dem committee appointee. Then Democrats explored Feinstein’s possible resignation to allow for fresh committee appointments – to ensure confirmation of more liberal judges — soon dissipated as Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer determined that McConnell could still derail his effort to install a new Democrat on that all-important committee.
McConnell forced Sen. Feinstein’s to be wheelchaired back to vote in person, possibly before she fully recovered. (If you don’t know this, the whimsically named disease of “shingles” can be horrific at any age, painful and energy draining.) For her, it’s been a case of duty before age.
For McConnell, he’s the man who drove über through a constitutional loophole to deliver today’s 6-3 conservative majority to the Supreme Court. In McConnell’s case, media reporting that leaps to the rhetoric of a congressional “gerontocracy” allowing a battery of aged political leaders to impede the advancement of younger leaders, has widely missed his standing with Republican leaders.
Far from wanting him out of the way, they fear that McConnell, the Senate’s shrewdest procedural contortionist since Lyndon Baines Johnson, will miss even a day on the Senate floor. This was also true of Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi, when she stepped aside last fall as House Majority Leader. For all of the noise before the 2022 midterms about Washington’s “gerontocracy,” when the time came, President Joe Biden urged the most capable Majority Leader since Tip O’Neill to remain.
But following the hammer attack on her husband, and years after she indicated wanting to step back, it was time for her to do so. For both Pelosi and McConnell, political loyalties and emotions aside, it’s been their deft experience-applied skills, that kept them in place.
Media Trips On Way to Real Issues
The obsessed trepidations by major media and politicians about visible signs of aging among their leaders begs what’s essential to this pivotal moment for each party. Certainly, one couldn’t watch video of McConnell’s infarcted moment or Feinstein’s vocal stumble without empathy for the personal vulnerability for those in later life. But it’s journalism’s job to baffle noisy emotions, so voters can hear the genuine issues.
Predictably, though, national media immediately jumped to, as Geoff Bennett of the PBS News Hour framed the concern (July 29), “What are we to make of the gerontocracy?” He posed the question to progressive Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart and conservative WaPo contributor Gary Abernathy, who grappled awkwardly with a range of issues around age, but not ability.
On the idea of age restrictions Capehart rightly emphasized that the senators’ individual medical conditions don’t necessarily generalize to others. Abernathy declared his opposition to term limits, but conjectured that some form of cognitive testing may be in order past some uncertain age.
Yet Bennett’s framing of age, with the false narrative of a “gerontocracy,” by definition presumed to block out younger decision makers, served to entrap the conversation. The age narrative also dominated the reporting across many platforms, such as that Friday evening’s NBC Nightly News, which aired photo montage of President Biden tripping here and there and the New York Times’ hackneyed “Political Memo,” on “How Old Is Too Old.”
The implication of intractable decline as an inevitable risk of old age supposes that Sens. McConnell and Feinstein are frozen in place, perhaps by personal stubbornness, and surely by a calcified system of Senate seniority. However, the leaderships of each politician’s party, far from worried about signs of incapacity, are furrowing their brows over the loss of critical actors.
Meanwhile, there should be no mistake that the amplification of “80” has one target, regardless of President Biden’s functional performance. And for the public, that focus is superseding a balanced examination of his performance and that of his opponents.
As always, major media’s rote default to age is not only lazy journalism, it disserves the public’s need for more effective analysis of today’s political circumstances and entanglements.
— Paul Kleyman
2. THE STORYBOARD
Summer Story Links from the Journalists in Aging Fellows
As we close applications for the 2023-24 Journalists in Aging Fellows Program, which our Journalists Network on Generations (GBONews publisher) has run for 14 years in partnership with the Gerontological Society of America, the flow of fellowship stories from our current “Class” of journalists keeps rolling off the virtual presses. Here are summaries of the latest stories for scrolling through the headlines for your summer reading. Meanwhile, once our decision panel of journalists and gerontologists meet we’ll announce the new Class.
*** “‘I’m a soldier first’: Senior, Black female vets share experience in U.S. Military,” by Abriana Harron, Indianapolis Recorder (July 28, 2023): The Lede: “Being a soldier runs deep in Aletha Calloway’s family. . . Growing up, she recalls many times when her family sat in their Washington D.C. kitchen, talking about their service. So, when she graduated from high school in 1972, she decided to follow in their footsteps and become a soldier.”
In a Nutshell: “Women, like Calloway, pioneered their way through racial and gender discrimination as well as a lack of acknowledgement to pave a way for more opportunities for today’s Black female soldiers. Black women have played a pivotal role in the U.S. Military for over 100 years; yet, Black female soldiers and veterans often do not receive the same recognition, support and thanks as their white and male counterparts.”
Since When: “Women’s involvement in the military can be traced back to the Revolutionary War. During the Civil War, enslaved people also had roles in the military too, like Cathay Williams. In 1861, Williams was an Army laundress and cook until she later disguised herself as a man and enlisted into the U.S. Army. . . During World War II, an all-Black women group, the 6888 Central Postal Directory Battalion, sorted and cleared a two-year backlog of mail for about 7 million people.”
Remaining Issues: Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, director of Purdue University’s Military Family Research Institute, said, “Problematic policies such as requiring soldiers to give blood at the end of basic training — giving blood depletes women’s iron and puts them at a greater risk for injury — that do not ‘take into account how women’s bodies are different from men’s’ will need to be addressed, she said.’”
Sex and Race: “Exposure to sexual and/or sexual harassment is also still a big issues for women in the military. . . Dr. Dorothy Simpson-Taylor . . . worked at a Veteran Affairs hospital as a psychologist. Then, she became a professor at Indiana State University and in 2010, created the Sister Soldier Network . . . the now 78-year-old was inducted into the Indiana Military Veterans Hall of Fame in 2022 . . . Oversexualization is one of the biggest challenges Black women must overcome in the military, Simpson-Taylor said. ‘Don’t minimize who I am because of my gender or my race,’ she said.”
*** “Oklahoma Parkinson’s Alliance,” by Cecilia Hernandez, Telemundo Noticiero Oklahoma (July 10, 2023): Original Spanish-language broadcast script also published with English translation: The Lede: “When somebody receives bad news they can feel as if their world begins to crumble, but fortunately, in many instances, help is available and all you have to do is search for it. Everything started when John Gerber and his wife realized that something was wrong. “We walked three to four miles regularly, and all of a sudden we realized that my arm was not swinging when I was walking. And at school, I started having problems conducting the orchestra.”
And: “Once they were able to assimilate the [Parkinson’s] diagnosis, they decided they were not going to allow it to become a death sentence and decided to get help from the Oklahoma Parkinson’s Alliance.”
*** “Why Cancer Treatments Might Not Work Very Well for Older Adults,” by Jyoti Madhusoodanan, Undark(June 26, 2023), and Slate (July 6, 2023): The Dek: “People over 70 have a heightened risk of cancer, yet they are under-represented in clinical trials of new drugs.”
The Lede: “In October, 2021, 84-year-old Jim Yeldell was diagnosed with stage-3 lung cancer. The first drug he tried disrupted his balance and coordination, so his doctor halved the dose to minimize these side effects, Yeldell recalled. In addition, his physician recommended a course of treatment that included chemotherapy, radiation, and a drug targeting a specific genetic mutation.
This combination can be extremely effective — at least in younger people — but it can also be ‘incredibly toxic’ in older, frail people, said Elizabeth Kvale, a palliative care specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, and also Yeldell’s daughter-in-law. Older patients are often under-represented in clinical trials of new cancer treatments, including the one offered to Yeldell.”
The Upshot: “This dearth of age-specific data has profound implications for clinical care, as older adults are more likely than younger people to be diagnosed with cancer. In the U.S, approximately 42 percent of people with cancer are over the age of 70 . . . and yet they comprise less than a quarter of the people in clinical trials to test new cancer treatments. . . As a result, clinicians have little way of being certain that approved cancer drugs will work as predicted in clinical trials.”
And: “Last year, the FDA issued guidance to industry-funded trials recommending the inclusion of older adults, and relaxing other criteria, such as measures of kidney function, to allow for participants with natural age-related declines. Still, the problem persists.”
*** “Discrimination May Hasten Menopause in Black and Hispanic Women,” by Jyoti Madhusoodanan, Scientific American (June 29, 2023; although not an official Fellowship story, she let us know this important article derived from her research through the program): The Dek: “Researchers say understanding differences in when menopause starts in racial and ethnic groups can help with screening and preventive care.”
The Lede: “An inclusive review of decades’ worth of data reveals new insight into menopause and aging in women of color, suggesting Black and Hispanic women are likely to experience menopause measurably earlier than those who are white. The researchers say the difference is possibly caused by the grinding daily stresses of racism. The study, published . . . in the International Journal of Epidemiology, pulls data from one of the largest, longest-running efforts to understand the health of women as they age and experience menopause.
The Research: “Launched in 1994, the ongoing project, known as the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN), spans seven research centers and has recruited more than 3,000 participants across five racial and ethnic groups and a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures. But despite their deliberate and extensive efforts to provide inclusive data, the SWAN scientists recently noticed that some women had still been left out: many postmenopausal people who volunteered for the study—particularly those who were Black and Hispanic—had inadvertently been excluded.”
*** “Climate Change Can Harm Mental Health of Older Adults,” Q&A With Dr. Robin Cooper, by Ambika Kandasamy, San Francisco Public Press (June 16, 2023): The Lede: “Climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of wildfires and other environmental disasters in California and beyond. Wildfires, like the recent blazes in Canada that brought smoke to the Midwest and Northeast regions of the United States, pose threats to the physical health of older adults, especially those in marginalized communities. Emerging research shows events like these could take a toll on the mental health of older people as well.
Who: “Dr. Robin Cooper is co-founder and president of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, and an associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She also has a small private practice in the city.”
Why: Q: “You’ve been working as a psychiatrist for decades, and in recent years, you’ve been exploring the threats of climate change to mental health. What got you interested in this field?”
A: “I have always been, outside of my professional endeavors, an activist. At the time that I began to learn about and think about and be introduced to the issues of climate change. . . I began to be involved much more in the health impacts.”
Q. “Could you describe how climate change affects the mental health of older adults?
A: “We know about the Paradise fire. Paradise was a community that had a large number of retirees. It was affordable. . . These are people who retired, they’re on fixed incomes, who lost everything. So, when you lose your home, and you don’t have a lot of economic resources for rebuilding, you really have secondary emotional impacts. . . We need to make changes in our health care delivery as we confront the vast kinds of troubles that people are going to experience from climate change. And that means shifting to funding and providing care in a more public health, community health manner using population-based ways of intervening.”
*** “Senior living: What to do when arthritis dictates what you do,” by Elissa Lee, OTD, OTR, and Albert Jiang, Southern California News Group/Press-Telegram, Los Angeles Daily News, others (June 16, 2023): The Lede: “Thomas, 72, was once an avid hiker. . . The retired post office clerk had been struggling with osteoarthritis in his knees for decades, but now the pain in his knees flared so badly that he found himself spending more time indoors – in bed, in the armchair.”
The Crux: “Arthritis affects nearly a quarter of all adults in the United States, and there is great variability in how it may impact day-to-day life. For some, it could be so severe it is the barrier that keeps us from doing what we love (and need to do) everyday; for others, it is a limiting factor for mobility on top of everything else. Arthritis can affect any joint, but the ones that give older adults the most problems are the knees, hands, wrists, and hips. Prevalence has increased — with knee osteoarthritis doubling since the mid-20th century.”
*** “The Hidden Epidemic Endangering Coloradans, Especially Older Adults,” by Claire Cleveland, Collective Colorado (June 12, 2023): The Lede: On a sunny afternoon, Carolyn Campos and Naomi Bates are midway through a game of checkers. They’re sitting in Campos’ apartment at a facility in Aurora for people who are 62 and older. . . They have an easy friendship, as if they’ve known each other a long time. Yet in fact, they just met in March after they were connected through the Senior Companion Program, which is part of Spark the Change Colorado, a volunteer, service and civic engagement organization. The program matches volunteers who are 55 years or better . . . Funded by AmeriCorps Seniors, a federal service agency.”
In a Nutshell: “Loneliness and social isolation are increasingly being recognized as a nationwide epidemic. The U.S. Surgeon General’s office, headed by Vivek Murthy, MD, MBA, released an 81-page report earlier this year detailing the scourge of loneliness and social isolation.
Some Stats: “Nearly half of all adults in America reported experiencing loneliness in recent years—and that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. . . Loneliness is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression and premature death. It poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day and costs the health industry billions of dollars annually, according to the surgeon general’s report.
Diversity: “About three in four Hispanic adults are classified as lonely and nearly 70% of Black/African American adults are lonely—both are at least 10 points higher than what is seen among the total population, according to research from health company The Cigna Group. More data is needed to understand loneliness among other groups, such as LGBTQIA+ older adults, who are twice as likely to live alone and often lack family support, according to a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.”
We’ve been fortunate to have had numerous nonprofit funders for the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program over the years, and we’re grateful that so many have seen the importance of developing a multicultural range of journalists trained in covering the complex issues of aging. For the class of 2022-23 funders includes the Silver Century Foundation, John A. Hartford Foundation, Archstone Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund and the NIHCM Foundation, plus a generous contribution from John Migliaccio.
3. THE BOOKMOBILE
*** “Who will care for you when you’re old?” NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report, (July 26, 2023, 4:30-minute story starts at 4:00, after headlines): Host David Brancaccio interviewed MacArthur “Genius” awardeeM.T. Connolly about her new book, The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life (Public Affairs/Hachette, 2023). Connolly, founding head of the Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative, crafted the Elder Justice Act passed as part of the Affordable Care Act.
Connolly stated, “We don’t know how much of the $100 billion of taxpayer dollars that nursing homes receive actually goes to caring for and the benefit of residents.”
Brancaccio asked about assisted living companies.” Connolly replied, “Nursing homes are regulated at the federal level, and they have to submit a lot of data. And you can measure apples-to-apples to the extent that the data submitted are accurate, Then you can compare one facility to another. But with assisted living, that’s regulated at the state level, and it’s very different from state to state, and often from assisted living facility to assisted living facility. So it makes it very difficult for consumers. Even people with a lot of education and resources find navigating old age is really complicated, whether it’s the care or facilities of the financial issues or the navigating of autonomy — safety interests. And we need to give people better guidance to do that.”
Solutions: More broadly, as Rich Eisenberg noted in his interview with her for PBS’s Next Avenue (July 18, 2023), “Connolly is an ardent proponent of “restorative justice,” which rejects the “traditional adversarial, polarizing, retributive approach of elder justice and elder fraud prosecutions. Instead, restorative justice brings together people affected by elder justice crimes or conflicts with members of their families, communities and social service agencies — sometimes through victim/offender reconciliation or mediation.
The story goes on, “Connolly points to the elder justice toolkit written by researchers Juanita Davis and Katie Block, which included a series of videos about helping older African American elder abuse survivors. “In interview after interview, people said, ‘If you’re not going to help my family, you’re not going to help me,'” said Connolly.
Eisenberg concluded the interview, “In The Measure of Our Age, Connolly asks: What makes aging so much harder than it should be? Her answer: our lack of preparation and underestimation of aging as well as our fear and denial about it. ‘It is a privilege to be alive,’ she told me, ‘so let’s think about it in that context.’”
For media review copies contact Jaime.Leifer@hbgusa.com.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Age Boom Fellowships Top 100 Applications: Columbia University’s Journalism School and its Mailman School of Public Health exceeded more than 100 applications for its Age Boom Academy fellowships, according to Caitlin M. Hawke, the program’s project lead. Their judges are poring over the submissions now, and, “We won’t announce until 8/4 or 8/7,” she told GBONews. Their online panel sessions and events (story clinics, meet-the-changemaker breakouts and one-on-one interviews with experts) spread through October will focus this year on America’s housing crisis and healthy longevity. We hope to announce the newest Age Boomers in our next issue.
*** GBONews Editor in Online Return to ASA: That’s me. I was pleased to be invited to revisit my old aging employer, the American Society on Aging (ASA), for a Zoom webinar on “Aging, Ageism and the Media,” July 20, I spoke in conversation with gerontologist Helen Dennis, of USC’s Davis School of Gerontology, and 20-year columnist on aging for the Los Angeles Daily News and other Southern California News Group editions. (It was a members-only program.)
While at ASA for 20 years, I was the editor of the association’s newspaper, Aging Today (now online renamedGenerations Today, edited by Alison Biggar). I left in 2008 to develop the Ethnic Elders Newsbeat for New America Media (NAM)/Pacific News Service, where I also helped to establish the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program in collaboration with the Gerontological Society of America. Although NAM folded in 2017, the Fellowship continues now toward its 14th year. Also, while at ASA, I co-founded what is now GBONews publisher, the Journalists Network on Generations.
Although, the professionals wanted to know ways to confront our ageist media ways, I took the opportunity to suggest that they take the opportunity to engaged with reporters collegially as fellow professionals, rather than professionals being media-adversarial, as in, “Why is the media is so ageist!?” I deferred to the spirt of the late Robert N. Butler, MD, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Why Survive? Being Old in America, first director of the National Institute on Aging, and avid advocate for improved cooperation between reporters and gerontologists.
I noted that Dr. Butler, who also coined the term “ageism,” urged professionals to regard journalists collegially and spend time to educate them on the issues in aging, not just to complain about “the media,” or to use encounters to promote their own programs. Instead, if a reporter seems genuinely interested in the subject, and not merely meeting a deadline, engage them with background information and sources, including those outside of their own sphere, to establish themselves as reliable sources.
Meanwhile, ASA President and CEO Peter Kaldes announced recently that at the end of August he is leaving after three years to head Colorado’s NextFifty Initiative, a Denver-based national foundation in aging.
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 2023 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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