Last June 3, two people died on Catalan roads. A 76-year-old man driving an SUV died when his vehicle left the road in Lleida; and a 37-year-old motorcyclist also lost his life in an accident on the Litoral roundabout in Barcelona. The information published by La Vanguardia highlighting that the death toll on the roads in 2023 would rise to 63 people began by highlighting the age of the septuagenarian, but did not mention that of the motorcyclist.
“It seems that emphasizing the age of drivers, if they are older than 65, is part of the Style Book of the main media”, lamented days later Francesc Xavier Altarriba, doctor and director of the Prospective Institute and Analysis of Social Reality (Ipars). Altarriba wrote to the newspaper to denounce that this is an example of “ageism”, which Catalan law 19/2020 defines as “stereotyping and discrimination against people or groups on the basis of age.”.
Subscriber Joaquín Solana also wrote to me a few weeks ago about an image that frames this same phenomenon: a news story about the evolution of pension funds was illustrated with the image of “an old man, in a park, sitting on a bench feeding the pigeons”. For Solana, “this is a clear stereotype of the retired elderly, which the press repeats without being able to place itself in today’s reality”.
Mr. Solana added that “the old stereotypes linked to age discrimination are at odds with the trajectory of older people in 21st century society, a topic that Mayte Rius covered not long ago in two articles on the same pages” from La Vanguardia.
Indeed, the newspaper has informed and alerted with rigor and comprehensiveness about this type of discrimination. In addition to the reports by the aforementioned Rius, this Thursday it was the editor-in-chief of Madrid, Celeste López, who detailed how older people claim their diversity and refuse to be treated with superiority or paternalism.
The examples detected and denounced by Altarriba and Solana, however, show that sometimes from the newspaper we also fall involuntarily into simplification and stereotyping. And the first step to correcting it is to be aware of it, in this case with the help of our readers.
