Old News

“The press seems relentlessly focused on the status of the elderly,” Lucy Schiller wrote for CJR last year. She was referring to Joe Biden, the oldest president the United States has ever had; Donald Trump, his predecessor and rival; and the record-breaking age of the Senate. This was before the CNN debate, before ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interview, before Stephanopoulos said, to a passerby, “I don’t think he can serve four more years.” Before political journalism turned its full attention to gerontology. 

To examine journalism’s obsession with age, and aging news-obsessives, Schiller visited Schenley Gardens, a personal care facility in Pittsburgh—home to the oldest areas of the country—where residents receive help with “activities of daily living” (dressing, eating, bathing) and ceaselessly follow politics. Everyone has an in-room television; many subscribe to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and check in with coverage on their iPads, computers, cellphones. Sometimes, they gather to watch reports on a television in their common area. Pew Research has found that 85 percent of people over sixty-five often tune in to the news on TV. “Their consumption of the news is viewed as an unchanging fact, even as who is ‘old’ changes with time,” Schiller wrote. “That is, to become old is to become a news watcher.”

“More than the rest of us,” she found, “Schenleyans discuss the news with one another, in close quarters, every day.” But when asked about how journalists cover the subject of aging—or even candidates’ policies surrounding old age—residents expressed far less interest than in LGBTQ rights, immigration, and how the news has changed in their lifetimes. “Rather than empty nostalgia, to care about what you’ve always cared about—political concerns of all stripes, not just the concerns of ‘senior citizens’—makes basic sense,” Schiller observed. “Coursing inside Schenley Gardens were opinions and beliefs that reflected the complex selfhood of the residents, and eluded whatever filter age might suggest.”

The dialogue over very old politicians comes with a question: When is it time to quit? In her piece, Schiller raised the idea of “disengagement theory,” through which gerontologists have suggested that “not only are we naturally and inherently inclined to isolate ourselves as we age, but that society, eventually, is done with us.” A troubling thought. Still, she wrote, “there is a difference between calling for the retirement of oldest-old politicians—whose net worth usually far surpasses that of their average constituent, and who play a central role in determining the realities of all Americans—and calling for the mass retirement of older people from society, on the basis that shelving them is somehow natural.” The residents of Schenley Gardens, at least, are profoundly, persistently engaged with current events. You can read Schiller’s full piece here.

Betsy Morais is the managing editor of CJR.