Older people as represented in English quality newspapers

Purpose
This paper aims at tracing how older people and old age have been portrayed in English quality newspapers from 1989 to 2018 by comparing newspaper articles and readers’ letters to the editor.

Design/methodology/approach
This study follows the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse analysis and examines a corpus of readers’ letters to the editor and newspaper articles published in The Guardian and The New York Times, paying particular attention to the use and evolution of terminology and related stereotypes.

Findings
The investigation revealed how the portrayal of old age in newspaper articles and readers’ letters to the editor has mostly evolved symmetrically, with negatively connoted terms, including “elderly,” “old” and “aged,” which are generally perceived as unrepresentative of the new generation of older people, being replaced by more neutral or euphemistic expressions such as “older” and “senior.”

Originality/value
The analysis provides an interesting insight into how both the language and the discourse surrounding old age has evolved in the past few decades to accommodate to a changing society, taking into consideration how different professional and social groups, including older people themselves, represent and portray such an important life stage.