On June 3, two people died on Catalan roads. A 76-year-old man who was driving an SUV died when his vehicle left the road in Lleida; and a 37-year-old motorcyclist also lost his life when he went off the road, in the Ronda Litoral in Barcelona. The information published by La Vanguardia, highlighting that the balance of deaths on the roads in 2023 rose to 63 people, began detailing the age of the septuagenarian, but did not mention that of the motorist.
“It seems that highlighting the age of the drivers, if they are over 65, is part of the Style Book of the main media,” lamented days later Francesc Xavier Altarriba, doctor and director of the Institute of Prospective and Analysis of the Social Reality (Ipars). Altarriba wrote to the newspaper to denounce that it is an example of “ageism”, which the Catalan law 19/2020 defined as “stereotyping and discrimination against people or groups based on their age”.
The subscriber Joaquín Solana also wrote to me a few weeks ago about an image that frames this same phenomenon: a piece of news about the evolution of pension funds was illustrated with the image of “an older man, in a park, sitting on a bench giving to feed the pigeons”. For Solana, “it is a clear stereotype of retired older people, 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 discussed not long ago in two articles on the same pages” of The vanguard .
Indeed, the newspaper has informed and alerted rigorously and exhaustively 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 reject being treated with superiority or paternalism.
The examples detected and denounced by Altarriba and Solana, however, show that sometimes from the newspaper we also involuntarily fall into simplification and stereotyping. And the first step to correct it is to be aware of it, in this case with the help of our readers.
