Language:
Hebrew
Year of publication:
2022
Titel der Quelle:
ביטחון סוציאלי
Angaben zur Quelle:
118 (תשפג) 123-147
Keywords:
Older people in mass media
;
Older people Press coverage
;
COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- Social aspects
;
Mass media and public opinion
;
Ageism
Abstract:
This study seeks to expand the discourse on the construction of old age as asocial phenomenon in times of health crises. The study focuses on thechanges that took place in media representations of old age between the firstwave of the Covid-19 in Israel and the following two, considering the declinein morbidity and mortality among the elderly on the one hand, and thecontinuation of social distancing policy on the other hand.Theoretically, the study deals with the nature of the representation of elderlyfrom two perspectives: gerontology and communication studies. Methodologically, the corpus included media texts of three types: 267 newsitems, 25 opinion columns published in the daily printed and online pressalongside 13 sketches from two satire programs that used various rhetoricaltools to deal with the situation. The texts were published during the firstthree Corona waves. Content analysis was done using a model of ‘circles ofbelonging’ (Remer Biel and First, 2013) through which images of aging wereused in a media discourse: the first circle, ‘group affiliation’, addressed theboundaries of the old-age category and the characteristics of belonging to it;the second, ‘belonging to a family’, concentrated on intergenerationalrelations; the third, ‘belonging to work’, focused on the interrelationshipbetween old-age identity and professional identity; the fourth, ‘belonging tothe community’, traced the link between isolating the elderly living at homeand in institutional frameworks and social and community organizations .The model based on these four circles of belonging revealed ageistic andpaternalistic news representations of elder population promoting the policyof closure, and only later challenged these perceptions. In contrast, opinioncolumns and satire programs indicated established institutional ageism as asocial oversight mechanism. That is, the subordination of biological age tosocial and occupational closure. Despite the decline in morbidity in the nexttwo waves, the framing remained similar and the discussion on the elderlydeclined and became limited to reports of outbreaks of infection centers only.The opinion columns debated with the news discourse and suggestedadditional and sometimes alternative images .
Note:
With an English abstract.
URL:
אתר את הפרסום בקטלוג המאוחד של ספריות ישראל
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