What We Watch: An Alternate-And Ageist-Reality with Dubious Health Effects

Beginning of article

Every time you turn on die television, you enter an alternate reality in which 3 to 5 percent of the population is older than 65, and the majority of them are men. In the real world, people older than 65 are about 13 percent of the population, and women outnumber men four to three.

Such media underrepresentation has not varied a great deal since research on it began in the early 1970s, nor does the pattern vary across show type. Only one or two studies (out of dozens) have found older adults portrayed in numbers approaching their presence in die population, and one of those studies, from the early 1970s, found 13 percent older adult prime-time characters, but from a pool of only …