Much of this summer has been consumed by an intense focus on aging in politics. President Joe Biden (81) bombed at a debate in June, sparking an avalanche of reporting, takes, and speculation on his age and cognitive state—and, eventually, forcing him out of the presidential race in favor of Kamala Harris (59). Since then, the age story has decreased in volume—even though Biden remains in office and Donald Trump (78) remains Harris’s opponent. There has been some recent coverage of Trump’s age and his family history of Alzheimer’s; last week, Puck’s John Heilemann wrote about “The Biden-ing of Trump.” But the extent of that coverage has been a matter of debate. Some pundits have called out the media, arguing that Trump has benefited from a double standard in coverage of age. Max Tani, a media reporter at Semafor, pushed back, describing “the idea that the news media hasn’t constantly published stories” questioning Trump’s fitness for office as “insane.”
Liz Seegert has been a healthcare journalist focused on aging Americans and their issues for more than twenty-five years. She writes both about that population—which includes nearly fifty-eight million people, or 17 percent of the country—and also directly for them. In the early nineties, around the time her son turned four, she realized there was a need for good healthcare reporting in her native Queens and on Long Island. She eventually found a gig with HealthCetera, a show on the New York City radio station WBAI. The show was hosted by clinical nurses who educated Seegert on the ins and outs of delivering care. In 2007, Michael Bloomberg, then the mayor, declared New York an “age-friendly city.” Seegert wondered what that meant. “The more I delved into it,” she recalls, “the more there was to dive into.”
Today, Seegert is the health beat leader on aging for the Association of Health Care Journalists and the codirector of the Journalists-in-Aging Fellows Program, a partnership between the Journalists Network on Generations and the Gerontological Society of America. In both roles, she trains health reporters to better understand, prepare for, and frame stories about older people. She also writes service and solutions journalism geared to that audience for outlets including Time, Consumer Reports, and PBS. In her estimation, older people must grapple not only with a kaleidoscope of governmental programs, insurance networks, and tough-to-navigate infrastructure, but with how old age is stigmatized—the pervasive perspective that infantilizes and dismisses our elders while missing how much life is left after retirement. “If you retire at sixty-five or seventy, you’ve got possibly twenty years or more to contribute,” Seegert says. “Most people want to feel wanted, needed, and part of the world. They don’t want to fade away.”
Across two conversations—one on July 19, when the aftermath of Biden’s debate performance was still consuming the media world, and another this week, with focus on Trump’s age starting to sharpen—Seegert and I reflected on this summer of age in politics. We discussed aging as a beat, how ageism is alive and well, and why it is so necessary for the media to understand the difference between age and ability. Our two conversations have been collated below, and edited for length and clarity.
KL: How do newsrooms organize their coverage of aging? What sections do you find your work landing in most often?
LS: I often pitch to health editors and write for that section. I don’t know if that’s a reflection that perhaps they’re dealing with the situation on a personal level or that readers are asking for this coverage. But I have seen an uptick in receptivity, probably since right around the 2016 election, when age started to become a visible issue. There have been professionals talking about this, but it was often only talked about in the academic press. It’s been talked about in mainstream media much more often over the past decade.
Has the politicization of age affected that?
I can’t point to that as the only reason, but that certainly ramped up the conversation—particularly recently. I’m of two minds when it comes to focusing so much on candidates’ ages: it’s a valid consideration, but at the same time, it’s often fraught with stereotypes and misinformation and age bias, which is troubling.
There’s chronological age, which is the number of birthdays we’ve had, and then there’s biological age, which is physiological—how well you function in life. [The media is] focusing on the number rather than quality. By quality I don’t mean qualifications for office. I mean, How well are they aging? Just because you’re a certain age doesn’t mean that the picture that many reporters have in their mind of what it means to be that age is accurate.
What do you think the rhetoric around the ages of Biden and Trump says to the fifty-five million plus Americans who are older than sixty-five?
It says that ageism is alive and well; that there’s still a lot of work to do to change the stereotypes which are often ingrained in us from the time we’re children. I watch cartoons with my grandchildren, and you can see how old people are depicted as either frail and doddering or cranky. Think about the movie Up, for example. It’s a caricature. Most older people are fine. Most older people, yes, they have some health problems, which are manageable. Most older people are cognitively intact and want to contribute to society in some way, whether it’s working, volunteering, or whatever they happen to want to do. The outliers are just that—outliers. What it says is that journalists need to do a better job of assessing their own internal biases when they’re reporting on this.
Do you think this caricature is a reflection of American culture, or do you think it’s the reason why American culture perceives the aging population this way?
Most people don’t do a critical assessment of every news story they read. But where does that framing come from? The framing itself comes from the public. The framing comes from industries. If we talk about nursing homes, less than 1 percent of the over-sixty-five population are in nursing homes. When we talk about it in such a way as, These are horrible places and you don’t want to ever have to go there… well, some people don’t have family, are too sick or frail to live on their own. They don’t have an option. How we frame these choices and the issues surrounding older adults as a narrative needs to change. A sixty-five-year-old is not the same as an eighty-five-year-old. Often they’re all lumped together as this “older adult population.” It’s even hard to get data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or other agencies, because it will say “sixty-five and older.” Many of the experts I talk to, their mantra is, You’ve seen one eighty-year-old and you’ve seen one eighty-year-old. Between sixty-five and eighty-five, there’s all kinds of diversity, not only in health but in ability and interests. They are a very heterogeneous population. We forget that.
You have said that sometimes editors’ personal lives might make them more open to aging stories. How does that play out?
A lot of times I will pitch a story to an editor—perhaps it’s on caregiving for a parent or grandparent—and I’ll hear back, Oh, yes, I want to do that story. My mom’s dealing with this, or We just put a relative in a care facility. Many editors are dealing with aging issues, and they’re often just as lost as any reader. The more I report about caring for our aging population, the more I see that it’s a patchwork. You have to cobble together local programs, Medicaid, and maybe help from a federal program. People dealing with insurance companies don’t know where to turn. There’s no one resource. Reporting on it also requires going to multiple agencies, multiple sources. There isn’t a really good repository to get information that will enhance reporting. It’s easy to go to CMS and get nursing-home data, but that is only the beginning of a story.
We need to do a better job as a country to support this aging population. And there’s only going to be more of us, not fewer. Everybody has good intentions, but making change is hard. One thing we can do as journalists is point that out: Here’s an area that doesn’t have aging services, that’s not age-friendly because there’s no sidewalks. Maybe we can effect some change by saying, Here’s a resource. That’s our job. Older people are not going away. They’re visible. They vote. They want to be an integral part of society. If we keep making assumptions about this demographic, we’re getting the story wrong.
What do you think about the shift in age-related coverage of the presidential election after President Biden dropped out of the race?
Once Biden dropped out, the conversation about age shifted to Trump. It’s still ageism because they’re still focusing on the trope that he’s now the oldest candidate in the race. Yes, that’s factually correct, but underlying that are all the negative implications that come with age. If you remove some of the more outlandish stuff he says and does, are they focusing on his capacity or are they focusing on the stereotypes that come with being old? At seventy-eight, he will be the oldest candidate. What does that mean? Does it mean he’s unqualified? Or is he unqualified for a plethora of other reasons that have little to do with age? Is it his function? Is it his policies that make him more unqualified than another candidate? There has to be a real demarcation between age per se—the biological number of somebody—and ability, particularly in politics. When we talk about ability, especially when it comes to politicians, there are some myths and misconceptions that everybody who hits eighty is going to lose cognition or cognitive ability, and be frail and incapacitated. Did you know Biden has problems? Yes. No argument about that. Was it due to his age, or was age an adjunct to diminishing capacity? There are people who are seventy that have diminished capacity. There are people who are ninety that walk around just fine.
What are your thoughts looking back on this summer of age-related political stories?
One positive thing that has come out of it is that we’re even talking about ageism. It’s an easy trope to fall back on, but at least I’m starting to have the conversation about what constitutes “old” and what constitutes “too old.” People are living longer, and that’s just the facts. The early baby boomers are about to turn eighty. I don’t know that all eighty-year-olds even consider themselves “old” anymore. They’re not sitting in a rocking chair somewhere waiting to fade away. Reporters and the public in general still have this visual in their minds of what an eighty-year-old is, what they’re supposed to look like, or how they’re supposed to act. We’re going to be seeing a very different picture very soon. Not for everybody—there’s still a lot of people who have health conditions, dementia, and need a lot of care. But one of the good things about this political season is that we’ve been able to realize that a lot of older people do have capacity and still do have a lot to contribute. Once upon a time we used to think fifty was old. The closer you get to those numbers, the less old you think you are. We’ve gotta remember that we’re all biased. I am. I’m sure you are, too. But we can be aware of those biases. We can take that step back and frame it differently.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, Kamala Harris, who had indicated that she would schedule the first sit-down of her presidential campaign by the end of August, did just that, agreeing to appear on CNN on Thursday with her running mate, Tim Walz. Dana Bash will host. Elsewhere, after suggesting that he might drop out of next month’s debate with Harris on ABC, Trump confirmed his participation—though Harris’s team says the format isn’t yet settled.
- In other consequential-interview news, Norah O’Donnell, of CBS, landed the first sit-down that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has granted since she was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2022. (Jackson has a book out; the full interview will air on Sunday.) As Puck’s Dylan Byers noted, the interview was also O’Donnell’s first “big” one since announcing that she will step back as host of the CBS Evening News to focus on them.
- For CJR’s podcast The Kicker, Josh Hersh spoke with Patrick Lohmann, a reporter for Source NM, a nonprofit outlet in New Mexico, about coverage of wildfires. In 2023, Lohmann “moved to the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, to learn how residents were coping with the aftermath of the largest wildfire in state history,” Hersh writes. He learned that the destruction caused by fires “doesn’t end when the fire itself goes out.”
- The Guardian’s Tom Phillips and Patricia Torres profiled Operación Retuit, or “Operation Retweet”—an initiative among journalists in Venezuela that is using AI-generated avatars of newsreaders (called La Chama and El Pana, or “Bestie” and “Buddy” in English) to keep people informed about President Nicolás Maduro’s recent crackdown on dissent. The avatars help to keep real journalists safe by masking their identities.
- And Politico’s Christopher Cadelago reports that Steve Hilton, the British political adviser turned host on Fox News (who became a US citizen in 2021), is considering running for governor of California as a Republican in two years’ time. “Word of Hilton’s interest has already piqued the curiosity of leaders in Silicon Valley, including figures pining for a political disruptor,” Cadelago writes. One called Hilton a “precise ‘first principles’ thinker.”
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Kevin Lind is a CJR fellow.