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DOES THE NEWS MEDIA FOSTER A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR OLDER ADULTS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWS ARTICLES

The media has become increasingly more agenda-driven and politically biased in recent years. This research explores whether the major news outlets fosters an environment of negative sentiment towards the older adult population over a 4-year-period from 2016-2019. The paper uses a content analysis ap...

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Autor principal: Zhao, Erfei
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6845431/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igz038.3470
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author Zhao, Erfei
author_facet Zhao, Erfei
author_sort Zhao, Erfei
collection PubMed
description The media has become increasingly more agenda-driven and politically biased in recent years. This research explores whether the major news outlets fosters an environment of negative sentiment towards the older adult population over a 4-year-period from 2016-2019. The paper uses a content analysis approach. 199 news articles that include keywords such as "older adults", "seniors" or "elderly" are randomly selected among those published in the first week of March in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 from the online archives. Main attitudes towards the older adults are extracted and categorized. In the 4-year span, regression analysis shows that negative attitudes are apolitical and are found in almost two-thirds (64%) of the 199 news articles in both liberal and conservative news outlets, suggesting that the current media creates a ubiquitously hostile environment for older adults. However, more liberal news outlets tend to produce more articles with positive messages about the older adults (p<0.05), and more conservative news outlets tend to create more content that reinforces negative stereotypes of older adults as being vulnerable and less productive (p<0.01). The high percentage of negative attitudes and the ubiquitous negative attitudes in news organizations, in spite of their political leaning, suggests that the media environment has some influence on the news content. Political biases of the organization are associated to numbers of articles with positive messages and negative stereotyping. Promoting professional development and self-regulating mechanisms in journalism could aid in reducing ageism perpetuated in the media.
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spelling pubmed-68454312019-11-18 DOES THE NEWS MEDIA FOSTER A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR OLDER ADULTS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWS ARTICLES Zhao, Erfei Innov Aging Session Lb3620 (Late Breaking Poster) The media has become increasingly more agenda-driven and politically biased in recent years. This research explores whether the major news outlets fosters an environment of negative sentiment towards the older adult population over a 4-year-period from 2016-2019. The paper uses a content analysis approach. 199 news articles that include keywords such as "older adults", "seniors" or "elderly" are randomly selected among those published in the first week of March in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 from the online archives. Main attitudes towards the older adults are extracted and categorized. In the 4-year span, regression analysis shows that negative attitudes are apolitical and are found in almost two-thirds (64%) of the 199 news articles in both liberal and conservative news outlets, suggesting that the current media creates a ubiquitously hostile environment for older adults. However, more liberal news outlets tend to produce more articles with positive messages about the older adults (p<0.05), and more conservative news outlets tend to create more content that reinforces negative stereotypes of older adults as being vulnerable and less productive (p<0.01). The high percentage of negative attitudes and the ubiquitous negative attitudes in news organizations, in spite of their political leaning, suggests that the media environment has some influence on the news content. Political biases of the organization are associated to numbers of articles with positive messages and negative stereotyping. Promoting professional development and self-regulating mechanisms in journalism could aid in reducing ageism perpetuated in the media. Oxford University Press 2019-11-08 /pmc/articles/PMC6845431/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igz038.3470 Text en © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Session Lb3620 (Late Breaking Poster)
Zhao, Erfei
DOES THE NEWS MEDIA FOSTER A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR OLDER ADULTS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWS ARTICLES
title DOES THE NEWS MEDIA FOSTER A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR OLDER ADULTS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWS ARTICLES
title_full DOES THE NEWS MEDIA FOSTER A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR OLDER ADULTS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWS ARTICLES
title_fullStr DOES THE NEWS MEDIA FOSTER A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR OLDER ADULTS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWS ARTICLES
title_full_unstemmed DOES THE NEWS MEDIA FOSTER A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR OLDER ADULTS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWS ARTICLES
title_short DOES THE NEWS MEDIA FOSTER A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR OLDER ADULTS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWS ARTICLES
title_sort does the news media foster a hostile environment for older adults: a content analysis of news articles
topic Session Lb3620 (Late Breaking Poster)
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6845431/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igz038.3470
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