Media Portrayal of Older Adults Across Five Canadian Disasters.

ABSTRACT

We conducted a constructivist grounded theory approach in which discourse analysis was used to explore how Canadian news media portrays older adults and aging in a disaster context. We analyzed 119 articles covering five Canadian disasters and identified four themes (a) stereotypes of older adults are presented on a positive-negative continuum in journalistic coverage of disasters, (b) journalistic coverage tends to exclude perspectives of older adults from relevant discourse, (c) journalists assess the value of losses for older adults-"home" as a central concept, and (d) disasters are framed as disrupting retirement ideals. A model was created to provide an overview of the journalistic coverage of older adults in disaster contexts. Understanding how old age and aging are presented by the media in a disaster context is important because it has further implications for informing and structuring disaster risk reduction policies.