We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and provide you with a greater experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Recent studies show that media coverage of older people’s issues in the media during the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a (re)emergence of negative age stereotypes. However, those studies were basically based on written documents. Since visual photographs have the power to attract more attention than words, this study set out to investigate the visual representation of older people in the media. Thanks to internet crawling, we have come across a total of 3,560 articles with keywords such as “elderly people” and “COVID-19 pandemic” on the four most popular online news sites in Germany during the first phase of the pandemic. We implemented a visual content investigation to assess the frequency of a varied set of older adult characteristics in the canopy images of the articles in inquiry (N = 604). Older people were described at most as physically weak, lonely, professionally supported, passive, living at home or in a nursing home, and cognitively inactive. The photographs, usually of passing women, were characterized through a stereotyped presentation that evokes distance from the subject through reframed faces. Our findings mirror findings about negative media representations of older adults as consistently vulnerable in verbal tissues during the COVID-19 pandemic, in contrast to increasingly mixed representations prior to the pandemic. This stereotyped representation of older people can be interpreted as visual ageism, amplified through their visual otherness. Our effects demonstrate the need for the media to reflect on these practices, since negative age-related stereotypes affect the intellectual aptitude of other people of all ages.
No CrossRef knowledge available.