Abstract

POCHINTESTA, Paula  and  BAGLIONE, Florencia. Older people and pandemic. Content analysis of press headlines in Argentina. Inter disciplina [online]. 2022, vol.10, n.28, pp.571-589.  Epub Dec 05, 2022. ISSN 2448-5705.  https://doi.org/10.22201/ceiich.24485705e.2022.28.83313.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the population has been segmented by age and vulnerability to the virus. Therefore, elderly people have been defined as a high-risk group. Social discourses and practices built a view on the elderly, reinforcing some biases and leaving out the typical diversity of the aging process. By addressing the production and reproduction of meanings in mass media, this study analyzes how the news headlines in Argentina have represented senior citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed print media headlines from Argentinean national, provincial and local newspapers. We used Google News as a search engine, and the following keywords: “pandemia” (pandemic), “personas mayores” (elderly people), COVID-19 and “abuelos/as” (grandfathers/grandmothers), filtering by location. Content analysis was used to analyze a total of 206 news headlines from March 2020 to January 2021. We observed that 41% of headlines show a positive view on the elderly, including pandemic-related elderly care policies, recommendations within the family circle and the institutional and community environments, and, to a lesser extent, their resilience, and their recovery from the disease. On the other hand, headlines offering a negative view of this social group (36%) focused on deaths, infections, vulnerability and risk of the elderly in the context of the pandemic, as well as situations of cruelty and abuse. The remaining headlines (22%) were classified as neutral, as they describe processes. Regarding how senior citizens were referred to, we noticed that “abuelos/as” (grandfathers/grandmothers) is the most frequent term, and six out of ten times, it does not denote a family relationship. In other words, a stereotype that confuses family and social roles persists. To sum up, even though a positive view prevails, the ways of representing the elderly are not free from the reproduction of biases and stereotypes that are far from representing a diverse, heterogeneous and differential concept of old age.

Keywords : press; meanings; stereotypes; elderly people.

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