IS THERE AGEISM IN CROATIAN PRINT MEDIA? CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE

Apstrakt

In societies where inter- and transgenerational transfer of family stories and histories, knowledge and customs, as well as intergenerational bonding have been reduced due to a nuclear family lifestyle and where various age groups do not share their everyday life experiences, media, both traditional and modern, are often an important source of information about all age groups. However, they often, deliberately or not, create an unfavorable public perception of a natural process of growing old, while youth is usually enthroned. Ageism is a term denoting discrimination of a person whose capabilities, mental capacities, knowledge, skills and social position are assessed and judged solely against their age, regardless of their individual traits.

Drawing on critical discourse analysis framework, in this paper we dealt with age-related examples collected from Croatian print media issued in the course of one month to establish how people past age of 65 were referred to and discursively represented and in which roles they appeared in texts. In order to provide a multi-axis perspective, a special focus was given to the examples at the intersection of age and other determinants of discrimination. Having collected and analyzed all the articles we can conclude that overt ageism transmitted via language is rather rare; however, there is latent ageism in representing older people in a limited number of contexts where they are not active participants in their lives, but passive recipients of aid, frail, sick, poor and often exposed to violence.